Reflections on Notes and Pretty URLs

So I’ve been chipping away here and there getting bits and bobs of the site done. “Chipping away?” You ask, “There’s bugger all here! Just a feed and a shitty blog without comments, what’s there to chip away at?” Well, over in the Control panel I’ve been faffing on with SSL and aggregating content from Twitter etc. to make myself feel a bit less lonely. I’m about two-steps away from just saying “Fuck it, may as well make myself a full Twitter client”.

I digress. This is my first toe-dip into the Indieweb, since I’m a bit tired of not owning my data. Currently I have two types of content, Posts and Notes: Posts are Blog Posts; Notes are basically, and unashamedly, Tweets. I try to follow pretty url rules in Posts, e.g. mrshll.uk/blog/pretty-url-here.

Notes (re Tweets) on the other hand, I don’t feel they’re particularly affected by pretty urls. Certainly not particularly enhanced. I currently use the id field of my Notes as a slug which generates urls like mrshll.uk/note/1. Would that be enhanced with a pretty url? My Notes are Tweets. Shall we look at the url of an individual tweet?

http://twitter.com/statuses/672366693830795264

This of course redirects to

https://twitter.com/LaffertySean/status/672354821299675136

(Sorry Sean, this tweet was in my immediate history from when I was faffing on w/ the Twitter API)

In both cases, Twitter use what at least resembles an id, timestamp, or hash for the slug; not pretty but it does its job because the length of a Tweet doesn’t really justify using any content in the url slug (plus hashtags etc). I feel I’m justified with using ids as slugs in Notes, there may be a security issue… but since all of my CRUD urls are behind some nice firewalls I’ll stick with it now. The IndieWebCamp page on Notes doesn’t seem to mention anything other than notes having a permalink.