At 05:05 PM 3/7/2006, Kevin Murphy wrote:
Well, part of the issue is that I want to be able to use this as part
of the link:
/news.php?article=2006-03-05a
/news.php?article=2006-03-05b
With respect, I too think you should re-examine your reasons for
wanting to number (or letter) the links consecutively in the database.
To whom does the spelling of an URL really matter? I believe that
website visitors rarely care; they care about how things are labelled
in the foreground and they want to get to the correct page, but I
don't think many people really study the details of the address bar
and even fewer make judgements about the quality or completeness of
website content on that basis.
There are in fact solid reasons for NOT changing URLs once they're
established -- for example, the persistence of bookmarks, links from
other websites, and search engine memory. Once you establish an URL
pointing to a particular page it's going to be recorded, stored, and
repeated by many other entities on the internet. If you're
whimsically changing URLs at random intervals, old URLs will no
longer point to the same content. You'll be doing your own material
a disservice by frustrating one of the most powerful assets the
internet can lend you: its persistence of vision.
I wonder if your desire for contiguously lettered URLs can be
satisfied by simply assigning consecutive letters to the display text
that links to the articles:
HTML:
<ol>
<li><a href="/news.php?article=9568367">Title of article</a></li>
<li><a href="/news.php?article=1937452">Title of article</a></li>
<li><a href="/news.php?article=4694832">Title of article</a></li>
CSS:
ol
{
list-style-type: lower-alpha;
}
RESULT:
a. Title of article
b. Title of article
c. Title of article
As others have pointed out, the sequence in which the URLs spill out
from the database can be controlled by a timestamp in each
record. The lettering of the articles a-z can be controlled by the
ordered list for the benefit of the visitor. When an article is
inserted into or deleted from the list, the list retains its
contiguity IN THE PRESENTATION and you aren't put in the inelegant
position of trying to renumber records in a database.
Regards,
Paul
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