Keith Devens .com

Entry 910

I really want to know what aaron uses for his weblog. I know he rolled his own, and he has a lot of Perl on his site, so it probably uses that, but I really want to know he got URLs to look like this: http://www.aaronland.net/weblog/archive/252 - Apache's Mod_Rewrite? I think that's the only way to do it (unless you use something other than Apache), but for some reason I keep hoping to find some secret trick that no one else knows about that will let me make cool URLs like that without it. The best I could do was to use links like /weblog/?id910.

The thing that's important, especially for links you want to keep permanent, is to hide the technology you use. For instance, it would be annoying to have used something like "/weblog/index.php3?id=910", since if I ever decided to move to, say, asp (mwa ha ha), I'd have to change all my URLs. The way it is now, I can rip out the technology, replace it with something else, and keep the urls the same, should I so choose. It's just that having something like "/weblog/910" would just be cooler.

Remember, cool URIs don't change, and good URLs are part of interface design.

More Like This says it uses Mod_Rewrite, and points to this article to explain how it's done. Cool. Well what do you know? I just got to the end of the article and it turns out it was written by him (Bill Humphries).

One more thing. Using Mod_Rewrite is cool and all, but while without it you tie yourself to specific URLs (but like I said earlier today you can always redirect them in your 404 page), with it, or with something like content negotiation, you tie yourself more closely to one server, or one web host who lets you use something like Mod_Rewrite (most don't).

Permalink | Comments? | id 910

05:13 (utc-5)
edited: 06:11 (utc-5)