Personally, I don’t think the day is needed…unless you’re making multiple entries in one day, or enough that you just can’t keep track of them unless you split the month down into smaller units, I’d say that just having the year and month is fine.
See Anne’s post about the perfect weblog system, under the URI structure -> individual entries section. Maybe it’s just that 3/4 of people just leave it at the default settings for the permalink.
Personaly, I’d rather dimp the date all together. I’ve never had posts by the same title, but the Archives links break if you don’t put the month/year into it (for the time being… eventualy I plan to replace the default archives w/ something else.)
I’d prefer that my permalinks were like this:
http://techgnome.anderson-website.net/post/on-naming/
(it’s safe to click if you like… it does work)
TG
Thread Starter
jumbo
(@jumbo)
Thanks for the advice people. I was using TechGnome’s method of no dates, but I’ve decided to shift to the
http://www.site.com/archives/2004/09/hello-world/
structure instead. With the old method, everytime I created a slug I asked myself, “did I already use this?” With the date format I won’t have to worry about it.
I too agree that adding the actual day within the URI is pointless and the shorter the better.
I agree on the dumping the date thing — I know that I don’t give a flying rats behind what date you posted your content on (in the url, mind you), I just want the content NOW. 🙂
So, I personally don’t use dates at all. This does mean that I have to use post ids in my permalinks, but I think its a pretty good trade off.
my permalinks
/notebook/%post_id%/%postname%
The main problem with using post ids is that if you ever decide to change your blog software or if you need to re-install in such a way that you’re forced to create new post ids, then all your permalinks will be broken.
Using the date structure is very “bloggy,” in the sense that when weblogging started it was very date oriented, something that we seem to be moving away from a bit, but it _does_ create a very sound URL structure. Personally I haven’t found an alternative that pleases me enough to switch.
This topic is a bit old, but I found that the default permalink structure of /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%post_id%/ broke my permalinks. When I added %day% before %post_id%/ it worked like a charm.
