One of the things I thought I had gotten right when I relaunched this site was URL structure. I thought I’d put all of my web apps in one sub-folder, all my programming stuff in another sub-folder, common libraries in another sub-folder, etc. However, since then I’ve realized my URL structure wasn’t that optimal. A lot of the sub-folders just made the URLs longer and the mashing together of words made a lot of the URLs hard to read. Examples:
https://patorjk.com/blogstylometrytool/
http://patorjk.com/colorfader/
http://patorjk.com/keyboardlayoutgenerator/
http://patorjk.com/software/gradientimage/
http://patorjk.com/software/colorpalettegenerator/
http://patorjk.com/typingspeedtest/
So, to pretty things up a bit, I’ve decided to change how I’m structuring URLs. My new rule of thumb will be to separate words with hyphens and to only use sub-folders when absolutely necessary. Since domain names are supposed to be compact, I think it makes sense not to include them in my hyphen rule. The new locations of the tools talked about above are:
https://patorjk.com/blog-stylometry-tool/
http://patorjk.com/text-color-fader/
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-generator/
http://patorjk.com/gradient-image-generator/
http://patorjk.com/color-palette-generator/
http://patorjk.com/typing-speed-test/
This seems like a rather superfluous change, but it was just one of those little things that was bothering me. I don’t plan to move anything else unless I make a major update to it, and all of the old links are 301 re-directed.
The one program I didn’t move was the Text Ascii Art Generator. This is because it has a bunch of links pointing to it and I didn’t want to mess up its standing in the search engines.
As for my current future plans, I hope to improve some of my existing web-apps. Unfortunately I was kind of tight on time this past week (I had to work past 9PM three times, I’ve got a lot to do at work), but I did do some mock-up Ext JS layouts for the Typing Speed Test program. However, after a little bit of thought, I think I’ve decided I’m just going to extend and change the one I currently have written. I hope to have a new version of it out within the next two weeks. After that, I’m going to try and refurbish another one of my apps.
Lastly, if anyone has any problems with accessing programs using the new URL structure (via old links or whatever), please let me know.