James Tauber

journeyman of some

blog > 2007 > 08 > 22 >

Trailing Slashes

The biggest mistake I made in Leonardo was making "foo" and "foo/" mean the same thing. I don't mean directing one to the other with a 301, I mean returning the same content at two different URLs. If you add the fact I listened on both jtauber.com and www.jtauber.com, it meant that every resource had 4 distinct URLs.

That's now fixed: www.jtauber.com redirects to jtauber.com and "foo" is redirected to "foo/".

Unfortunately, most of the del.icio.us bookmark counts I include at the bottom of each page are now effectively reset to 0. While 164 people had bookmarked "poincare_project", none had bookmarked "poincare_project/". Even though the former now redirects to the latter, I've effectively split the vote between past and future bookmarking of that page.

As far as I know, del.icio.us never heeds 301s and updates its database accordingly. Google Reader doesn't seem to either, judging by the continual checking of "/atom/full" in addition to "/atom/full/".

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Comments (12)

Michael R. Bernstein on Aug. 30, 2007:

Perhaps you should automatically search del.icio.us for non-canonical URLs and sum them up?

Also, tracking the totals over time will tell you the effect that the redirects are having on new bookmarks.

Keith on Aug. 31, 2007:

Should have made 'foo' canonical over 'foo/' imo.

James Tauber on Aug. 31, 2007:

Keith, it's Django that redirects 'foo' to 'foo/' not my code.

Shawn on Sept. 2, 2007:

Will you be releasing the code for the Django Leonardo? (Or did I overlook something)

James Tauber on Sept. 2, 2007:

I will be, but it needs a lot of clean up first.

Bryan on Sept. 6, 2007:

I'd be keen on seeing your port of the LFS even before you've cleaned it up ...

Morgan on Sept. 20, 2007:

Would your code be easily portable to Pylons?

Shawn on Dec. 31, 2007:

Any further news on this? Even partial code might be interesting; something to hack on.

James Tauber on Dec. 31, 2007:

Shawn, contact me at jtauber@jtauber.com for access to an early preview.

Charles on Jan. 18, 2008:

I too would be interested in trying out your Django blog software. May I email you?

James Tauber on Jan. 21, 2008:

Sure, Charles.

Natasha on May 17, 2008:

I have found two interesting sources http://fileshunt.com and http://filesfinds.com and would like to give the benefit of my experience to you.

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Created: Aug. 23, 2007
Last Modified: Aug. 23, 2007
Author: jtauber