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Article writing rules

These are the rules I’ve set for myself on here.

Any length. One word or 30000 pages. Never ever be driven by length when making these posts. Say what I wanted to say.
Go back and revise after posting if I find mistakes or things I wanna change. Like a one-person wiki.
Slugs are king. Slugs are the part after the slash in the URL. A page’s text should represent my canonical thoughts on that slug’s idea. I can go back and revise the page, even the title, many times. A big enough rewrite will get a new timestamp and go in the feeds again. This, too, is a “wiki”-like attitude.
A niche post, such as a reply or a hot take, needs a longer slug to reduce collisions. Or have the “re-”.

I brazenly reuse old urls and titles when I find that a newer essay seems to cover the same topic as an older one. This is a way to keep the archive from getting too redundant with overly similar posts, and to make sure that old URLs, old links, still point to a currently-canonical expression of the idea there.

Sort of a wiki/blog hybrid. There is a blog view and feed but the idea is also that I can evolve pages over time. Which is bad for the historical record but good for the dream that this li’l homepage will one day become good or at least better.

Because of this, I’ve been pretty happy with the decision to not put dates in the URLs. I don’t update the timestamps (which also repushes it to the feed and to Antenna) for typo fixes and updates but I can for rewrites.

slugs

Speaking of slugs, is it snake_case or hyphen-case? After realizing that I had been pretty inconsistent, I switched to my new policy which is: use hyphen-case if there’s one level, but if there’s two, use snake_case for the lower/tighter level. Like artist_name-song_name. This is an awful policy and not one I would’ve chosen if I had put more thought into it but it’s what gave me the least backwards breakage. Older posts also are not renamed, this isn’t a retroactive policy. It’s just a mess.