Why you should be using disambiguated URLs

161308 Resource 76407 2154 21 1173459135127 1200795308351 Controlled What's in a URL?

The importance of unambiguous, uniform and immutable URLs for your weblog posts

I ran across a recent post by <a target="_blank" href="http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/4/urls/" title="Why you should be using disambiguated URLs.">Simon Willison</a>, discussing the benefits of using unambiguous URLs. This is a feature of MyST Blogsites that is absent from some blogging platforms. Unambiguous URLs are important because they prevent confusion by browsers, caches, statistic tracking utilities, and other tools that serve your site.When we set up your blogsite, you choose the domain name that best reflects your brand and/or organization. For example:<a target="_blank" href="http://www.talkofourtowns.com/">www.talkofourtowns.com</a>or<a target="_blank" href="http://blog.healthpolitics.org/">blog.healthpolitics.org</a>You have complete control over the domain name without being bound to a particular naming scheme. We ensure that plausible references redirect to your proper home page. For example, references to <a href="http://www.talkofourtowns.com/">talkofourtowns.com</a> and <a href="http://www.talkofourtowns.com/">www.talkofourtowns.com</a> are both directed to the same site.Once you begin posting, your URLs are consistent and predictable. For example, the URL for this weblog is:<a href="http://blogsite.com/public/blog/76407" title="Marketing. Communications. Results. (HTML)">http://blogsite.com/public/blog/76407</a>There is a similar URL for the associated RSS feed:<a target="_blank" href="http://blogsite.com/public/rss/76407" title="Marketing. Communications. Results. (RSS Webfeed)">http://blogsite.com/public/rss/76407</a>And a similar URL for the associated Office Smart Tag document:<a target="_blank" href="http://blogsite.com/public/mostl/76407" title="Marketing. Communications. Results. (MOSTL; Smart Tags)">http://blogsite.com/public/mostl/76407</a>And similar URLs for other supported formats (ATOM, OPML, Object, and more).The benefit here is that once you’ve located an item or channel, it’s easy for a person or program to locate the same content in whatever format they require.In addition, our URLs are immutable. Once you make a post, the URL for the post will never change. Some blogging tools change the URL when the post is archived or edited. This results in broken links to that post which greatly detracts from the benefits of the blog. 9 application/xml false clean URLs consistent URLs imutable URLs Microsoft Office smart tags predictable URLs unambiguous URLs weblog URLs Why you should be using disambiguated URLs Weblog post by Simon Willison http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/4/urls/ Clean URLs Wikipedia definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL#Clean_URLs Clean URLs are consistent with other URLs in the same site in terms of hierarchy. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 76407 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web