Making Mistakes

A list of mistakes I’ve made maintaining this site and the reasoning behind making the changes to rectify them.

Moving Pages

One problem with the evolution of a blog is the temptation to change it. One thing I’ve tried to commit to from the start is a single url design but recently I’ve changed my mind and broken a few things. The reasons vary; scaling the site’s content, changes in build tool version and functionality, better url design UX and falling victim to good ol’ indecisiveness.

A general lack of publish date url design

Jekyll offers date url design out of the box. Posts are built into a directory structure yy/mm/dd enabling a more date hackable url design. Compare this of my current writing design writing/ground-zero/ vs writing/2013/02/16/ground-zero, the latter purveying date relevance from the url. Since then I’ve omitted the dd from the URL design I’m less likely to produce a large amount of content in a single day so setting sublevel at the month seemed more sensible.

There is also the issue of repeated entry titles e.g. writing/ground-zero/ written in 2016. Moving to the afforementioned design would also enable me to archive less relevant content as and when it’s needed.

Lessons learned

• URL design precedes the initial commit
• Map out the design with real content
• Experiment with the language
• Be consistent
• If it feels boated or clunky, you’ve probably made a mistake
• Abstract it
• Think future friendly