Comments on: Blog posts vs. web pages

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:41:21 +0000

Justin Williams:

… if I find a blog post that dates back to 2007 or earlier, I immediately dismiss it from the start. I may still read it, but I feel the content is already dated just by looking at its URL.

Yup. This is related to (possibly the cause of) what I mentioned in relation to the ASL posts: They’re old, so people expect inaccuracy, so people don’t report them.

So instead of having a tutorial on NSGradient at /2008/05/12/nsgradient_tutorial/ it would instead be at /article/nsgradient_tutorial/, which seems more future proof.

I’ve wanted to do that since the beginning of this journal (“blog”), but didn’t because there could be duplicate permalinks. Nowadays, WordPress enforces that all stubs must be unique, so I can do that. I’d just have to make sure to redirect existing links.

By: Justin Williams

Justin Williams — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:55:35 +0000

I’ve thought about this in passing as well as my blog musings have gone from being more long-form, and less time sensitive. The problem I find with date-based posts is that if I find a blog post that dates back to 2007 or earlier, I immediately dismiss it from the start. I may still read it, but I feel the content is already dated just by looking at its URL.

So instead of having a tutorial on NSGradient at /2008/05/12/nsgradient_tutorial/ it would instead be at /article/nsgradient_tutorial/, which seems more future proof.

Having said that, it’s not something that has bugged me enough to update my URL scheme and deal with the hassle of redirecting content.

By: ssp

ssp — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:44:24 +0000

I agree with the sentiment. Yet, the ‘argument’ isn’t quite convincing to me. There’s nothing that keeps you from editing and improving blog posts. _If_ there is a problem it’s that search engines seem to prefer the ‘new’ and that the whole ‘feed’ scene does as well, which may mean that changes to ‘historic’ material are lost.

On the other hand the great thing about blogging software, as you will be well aware, is that it’s _easy_. You click new entry, you type, you click post, you’re done. Setting up a specific web page may require a lot more work and mean that you won’t make the effort as a consequence.

Perhaps it’d be enough if blogging software could provide a way of specially ‘staging’ certain posts, by giving them special URLs and using a different design. I suspect you can actually achieve just that with standard blogging software (say by using categories) I haven’t tried doing it because I thought a blog post is just ‘good enough’. If the search engines are too stupid to find it _they_ should improve…