Making Mistakes

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

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.

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.

• 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