This is an issue I've been thinking about a lot recently.
Places like http://boingboing.net and sites that use MovableType have auto-uniquefying URLs with some semblance of human-readableness.
http://boingboing.net/2005/05/31/americ ... ized_.html
Obviously, this is a step forward from numbered URLs
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ ... 00017.html
or manually selecting names
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/war.html
What is the best way to auto-uniquefy a URL? Assume a blog-style post with a title, date, and text body, but the title and date are optional.
To wit: http://www.jonathan.pearce.name/news
I have no way to link to a single news update I have made. I've considered making target="" insertions, but I find those annoying. Also, they don't work on all platforms (read Hiptop). Fortunately, my corpus is regular so breaking it into different files is no problem, but what should I call them?
I was thinking "title_with_underscores" was good, unless I have conflicting titles. Which I might. Or no titles, which I do. I don't really want to use the date, because it's not unique. I could use some of the first words in the message body, but they're not unique either. This gradually leads me to some kind of form string, check for collisions, and loop plan, I think.