Monthly Archives: September 2024

Removing dates from post URLs

Originally I used a YYYY/MM/DD/<slug> url scheme for my blog, which felt nice since it creates namespacing and one can also get some date context about a blog post simply from the URL.

However, I eventually removed all date context from the URLs entirely. Namespacing isn’t a real benefit in practice (name collisions are rare) and neither is date context. I also found it annoying that I couldn’t type post URLS from memory, which is occasionally useful. Plus shorter URLs is also often a plus.

To migrate to this new URL scheme without breaking links, I used the “Redirection” WordPress plugin. Yet another reason why I like WordPress.

This simple no-date naming scheme is also inspired by bloggers like Paul Graham, Patrick Collison, and Sam Altman.