Date in the url

Question

I am in the early stages of a web site where I post every week. each post has a file. I thought it was better not to include the date in the name of the file and that makes the url the same way. I try to make the content timeless. This way a user can find an old post and realize that can be useful today.

But now I find this method has some drawbacks, I find more and more difficult to get my files organized. Can you suggest a good way to organize files-posts, have timeless content and clean url at the same time?

(I program everything myself, I do not use wordpress, drupal...)

Answer 1

First, it's not clear whether you consider difficult for you or for your users. If organization is a problem for you (but users don't necessarily see this as a problem), then you could easily use a date based folder structure and then re-write URLs so your users can't see the dates.

As for the outcome, you don't provide any info, but depending on the content, your users may like to have a date, whether it's in the URL or the body of the post. It's really annoying to find something on the web and then find out it's totally outdated, thus false. Be very honest about this, because everybody tends to think their content is timeless, and very few are right about this. And once an user finds one page in your site is irrelevant and outdated, you lose that user forever.

But of course, if your content is REALLY timeless, then rewrite URLs using .htaccess and problem solved (although some categorization might be useful, both for you and your users)

Answer 2

One solution is sorting posts by category. The url structure can be like this:

domain/category-name/post-title

Side note: Many times it's really useful to know when something was written. Or to even occasionally review and update. For example programming related articles.

Answer 3

No content is timeless.

Ok, now that we've got that out of the way, as a journalist one of my pet peeves has always been dates. I want to know when something was published, edited, or even deleted. Because often the value of the content is based on when, not how.

For example, I recently had to update an Android phone that I previously rooted. I couldn't just update it normally, I had to do it the hard way. And Android updates frequently, so the process to do this changes too. Most of the articles that explain how to do it at older, so my search is time-based.

Now I don't know what kind of content you're creating but having a time stamp is important. I personally prefer it in the URL because it doesn't hurt the user (few people ever type in direct URLs for articles), and it helps you as the content manager. And some readers who want to know the date can do it really easily without scanning through the entire article. TechCrunch does that and I love it.