I’ve redone the permalink structure on this site. It’s not something I really want to do often — they’re called permalinks for a reason — but it was time to clean it up. Redirects are in place to keep old links working.

The old structure was put in place when I upgraded to WordPress 1.0 six years ago. It seemed reasonable at the time, but the URLs were always just a bit too long. They’d break across lines in email, or get hidden by ellipses in forum posts, or (much later) take up 80% of a post on Twitter. When I launched Speed Force, I took the chance to learn from all the mistakes I’d made with this site and keep it simple from the start. Now that I’ve finished the tweet cleanup project, I’m taking the opportunity to do some more cleanup here.

So, the old structure was this:

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

The archives bit is useless, and didn’t do anything but take up space. The day was somewhat more useful, but it’s on the page already, and it’s not critical enough to include in the URL. I considered dropping the www. prefix, but that affects everything on the domain, not just the blog, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that for my Flash site.

It’s been simplified to this:

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/yyyy/mm/post-name/

It’s still not tiny by any standard, but it’s a lot more likely to fit on one line of an e-mail, and won’t be quite so unwieldy in social networking.

Next challenge: trying to make some sense out of the mess of categories and tags.