Why your blog URLs should contain dates.


I have a (very minor and polite) disagreement with Matt Gemmel's argument against dates in URLs. Before I start, let me be very clear; your blog = your rules. If you want to write your URLs as a series of Emoji or in Klingon - go right ahead. There really is no such thing as "best practice" - only personal preference and observed behaviour. That said... Here's my case for keeping dates in URLs. URLs are designed to provide information to humans and computers. That's why we don't just use …

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QRpedia - Custom URLs


QRpedia - Language-detecting & mobile-friendly Wikipedia QR codes.

This blog post is designed to foster a technical and logistical discussion. In much the same way as the earlier QRpedia language discussion did. One of the most requested features in QRpedia is to have custom URLs. For example, the British Museum may want a URL of "bm.qrwp.org". This has two main advantages. Better analytics. Although the British Museum is the only place likely to have the Rosetta Stone, many museums will have exhibits about "Ancient Egypt" or "Gold". By…

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When is a URL not a URL?


Summary Twitter's way of linking URLs is broken. It's annoying to users, and a pain in the arse to developers. This quick post talks about the problem and offers a solution. I've raised a bug with Twitter and I hope you'll star it as important to you. (more…) …

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Bugs in Twitter Text Libraries


The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter's style. One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is a URL and automatically create a hyperlink. Considering that dropping the "http://" represents 5% saving on Twitter's 140 character limit for messages, this is great. …

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