Thanks to Jon for pointing out All Consuming. Here's my blog in their service. Notice, however, that the screen shot is of my home page rather than by blog. I'm not sure why that is.
Posted by jzawodn at November 07, 2002 09:37 PM
Glad to know some people take this seriously.
The anti short-URL argument, I don’t buy. Yahoo has been using mod_rewrite (M_R) perhaps longer than any other major site, so "extra effort" can’t cost that much. Easy to email is great, but nearly as important is reducing the HTML markup size. You've got to link to all those long URLs. Yahoo is still largely a directory, which means lots-o-links. Unless you get your bandwidth for free, short URLs make sense in $$$ alone. Cutting one character on a site that heavily trafficked has got to mean tens of thousands of $$$ on the home page over a year's time.
On the question-mark issue I'm old-school. Used to be some search engines dropped "?" URLs on the assumption dynamic content changed too often to effectively index. That's changed a lot, but still I prefer /search/YHOO to /search?YHOO for max backward compatibility. As you said, only the advanced user really cares. But the compute factor for a heavy site means weighing M_R in Apache vs. local page translation in PHP et al.
On the "slash" issue, I'd go for fewer. I don’t know how you have Apache config'ed, but if it looks for .htaccess, extra DIR lookups matter a lot. I don’t know Yahoo's internal directory tree or how you handle these things, but I’ll bet the fewer subdirs, the better. Less disk access.
The screenshot they have of my page is also of the main page, not the blog.. I suspect a bug :)
Hey, we're google friends!
