linelo.net/jokes

This is post 6 of 10 from the Tumblr blog.

Our first attempt at Linelo web documents had long and not-very-pretty links that looked something like this:

   http://linelo.azurewebsites.net/trist.cshtml?U=public&F=jokes.llo

It does work, and who cares if it’s not very pretty? Well for one thing it doesn’t look very nice but more importantly, it is so complex that no one would ever try and bring up a Linelo document just by typing the address directly. Imagine if you knew that Linelo had a jokes file (it does) and wanted to bring it up by typing in the url directly? Not a chance.

So today we have layered a proper naming convention over top of this, as well as moving the linelo.net domain over to be the primary host. That same jokes web document can now be accessed with this link:

  http://linelo.net/public/jokes

Much, much better. This convention has the name in two parts: “public” is the account that owns the document, and “jokes” refers to the document itself. So all you need to remember is the account and the document title.

Wait, what? Account?

Ok, so Linelo allows anyone to create documents and there could be lots of different joke files, so Account allows us to pick the right one.

But for most public files we really shouldn’t ask users to remember even that much. So we’ve actually simplified it a bit even more for documents owned by the public account, and that same document can now also be retrieved with this link:

  http://linelo.net/jokes

And your web browser will probably allow you to cut the typing down even further to just this:

  linelo.net/jokes

Pretty hard to get much simpler than that. Now, if you can remember just the name of the file itself (index, jokes, aac, edmcivic, etc.), this new format means you can now bring up the file pretty easily without having saved a link somewhere.