Todd Eddy's Profile

during the signup process it asks you, at least I think it did when I got it (the monday after it being released). The password you enter on the iphone it saves to authenticate itself for the visual voicemail. but if you just called your number from your phone it would put you right into the voicemail system. that's what this fixes. I did it on mine early on so don't know if they fixed that later on.

Posted in /blog/2007/jul/iphone-security-concern.

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 at 20:22:21: Link

I'm right in the middle of overhauling my antiquated site. Lets just say the previous url structure was... detailed. I have the same idea that URLs should not expire or at least not for a long time. Right now my apache config is filled with a ton of redirect lines as I opted to just "flip the switch" even though the new site is missing a lot of content. A lot of stuff I just decided to drop because no one used it (http response 410 says a resource is gone and no alternative has been provided, "sucks to be you" basically). There's a bunch of 301 redirects, etc. I specifically left other pages alone so the give a 404 error since this means to a search engine "I think this page still exists, I just can't find it right now. Come back later" Apache web server provides the very helpful mod_alias module.

Also big on the no "www." part, just seems redundant to me. Admittedly I still haven't setup a redirect rule so it will remove the www from mine.

I'm still on the fence about adding an extension. No extension is shorter and actually recommended by W3C so if you change underlying technologies you don't have all these now-dead links (remember .php3 and .php4?) For example my old site used server side includes because I didn't know php that well at the time, so it had .shtml extensions--gives you an idea of how old this site was.

Even though when I look at it from a programmer's perspective I'd rather use numeric dates, as an end user an abbreviated month looks better. I do like actually creating dates as a lot of things are context sensitive. Take ".../blog/file-caching" for example. Caching is a very volatile topic. What was good two years ago may be horrible now. Plus the format of /blog/(year)/(month)/(title) is fairly commonplace and well understood. You could use the two url approach like a couple above mentioned. The "permalink" to an entry would be /blog/2007/jan/url-vanity but you could have a /blog/url-vanity that you could tell people and have it always direct to the most current page.

Some great examples of what doesn't work is just look at some of the URLs people have mentioned in this post. Not to pick on them, but something like http://www.nabble.com/Controller-subdirectory-organization-%28ZF-637%29-tf2941021s16154.html is a great example of a link that just doesn't work.

Ultimately, the best thing is that once you picked something, stick with it. Every time you change something you either just let the page give a 404 error (very bad) or you have to setup redirects, make sure any previous redirects also go to the new site, etc. So since I'm making a comment on a post 8 months old, my vote is for whatever it is right now :)

Posted in /blog/2007/jan/url-vanity.

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 at 20:56:56: Link