This coming Sunday, the Eighteenth Station will undergo a huge change: the structure of the website’s URLs, or permalinks, will change. To my dear readers who are not technology savvy, please bear with me as I explain why this change needs to happen. If you’re in a hurry, all you need to read is ‘What Will Happen’ and ‘Why This Needs To Happen Now’.
What Will Happen:
On Sunday, September 26th around 12:00 UTC-5, permalinks sitewide will be modified to remove the date from the URL. This will not affect Station pages such as the ‘About’ and ‘Series’ page, but it will affect every single announcement and Station post, which make up the majority of this website’s content.
Links that used to appear as:
eighteenthstation.com/2021/08/20/station-186-of-a-flower-ch15-02/
will now appear as:
eighteenthstation.com/station-186-of-a-flower-ch15-02/
As a consequence, every single link to this website, unless it is a link to the Home or About page, will break. I will manually fix all the links on the Eighteenth Station Facebook page, but any links posted by someone else will not work unless the person who posted them manually fix them as well.
Why Make This Change:
Removing dates from permalinks will improve the Station’s usability, discoverability, and the flexibility of URL links. Let’s talk through each of these one by one.
Website usability. Excluding the date from the URL results in a shorter link that is friendlier and easier to remember. It’s a distant likelihood that many users manually type in website addresses, or remember the specific title and station number they are looking for, but if the change makes browsing through the website less intimidating, I’ll take that as a plus.
Discoverability. This is the main reason for this change. There is this term called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. It is a broad term for how likely a search engine like Google is able to find a website. To be frank, the SEO of the Eighteenth Station sucks. It’s already bad enough the platform has a name that’s terrible for searchability (a problem I was well aware I would encounter when establishing the Station). Having the date in the URL, lengthening it for no meaningful reason, does not help. It is unlikely people will search for the website using the year, such as “2021”, as a keyword. They are more likely to search for the keywords “Eighteenth Station” on top of “blog”, “writing” or a story title. And, as said in the first point, the majority of people are just less likely to click on a link with a bunch of numbers, even if it’s just eight. The lower the clicks, the lower the relevancy, and thus, lower searchability.
Flexibility. Detaching permalinks from the date allow them to be more flexible to changes. Changing the date of a page will no longer be as consequential as it currently is. There are a small number of pages on the Station that are cover pages for a series. With the crude setup I created during the Station’s early days, because I am essentially a one-man team, these cover pages are essentially blog posts hidden from the front page using a special category tag. This way, I can create a page that lists all blog posts that use this tag, automatically listing all the series I’ve written. (It’s not a great system, and I may change it later.) As a consequence, these cover pages get the same treatment as all the other weekly station posts, meaning they have a date attached in the URL. This date is not too meaningful, so I assign the date to be the same date but slightly later time as the last chapter or chapter part, like the published date of a book. However, what this means for series that are in progress, or series that do not have a start or end, is that the date is constantly changing, thus the permalink will constantly change. This is an atrocious practice in website design. I can not overstate how bad this is, and it is bad for searchability as well. This problem has pained me from the start, every time I have to change the date of a page. The only reason I was unwilling to do this earlier is because there is no real mitigation set up for the turmoil it would cause, such as URL forwarding. It is only in the past few months where I’ve finally decided bite the bullet and just do it right.
Why This Needs To Happen Now:
The Eighteenth Station’s online presence is basically zero. It does not show up in Google Search. Its readers are either dedicated commuters or the rare few that discover the Station through WordPress Reader. Even the Facebook page, which I’ve only ever advertised to my small friend circle on that platform, has better searchability.
If there’s any time to shake it up, it would be now, because invalidating more than 95% of the permalinks to the website will inflict a massive amount of damage to the website’s searchability in the meantime. Imagine for a second if this change was carried out after the Station had generated some attention on other forums or social media. Every single link posted out there would be broken, and those links are out of my control to go and fix. Sure, the broken links would still lead people to the website, but leading someone to a 404 page is not a great experience and looks horrible as a first impression.
Moving Forward:
I’ve been giving a lot more thought and care to the Station website recently, albeit to the detriment of my writing. Though it does the job of delivering passages of text across the world wide web, the design and usability of the website is something I care a lot about. Fixing the permalinks is a big improvement, but does not address all the usability problems. It is only one part of the improvements I have been working on, and quite frankly can be done with one click. The next part is a little more involved, and consist of changes to the website design itself. Stay tuned for more details.
— taikode