Improve Rev News Navigation

[ayu-ch]

Currently, Rev News URLs follow the format:
/rev_news/:year/:month/:day/:title/
For example:
https://git.github.io/rev_news/2025/02/28/edition-120/

I think simplifying them to /rev_news/:title/ would help people access editions directly without needing to go through the archive.

For example:
https://git.github.io/rev_news/edition-120/

Additionally, I think it would be helpful to add "Previous" and "Next" links at the bottom of each Rev News edition. This would allow readers to easily move between editions without manually searching for them.

[chriscool]

Thanks for the suggestions!

I agree with some "Previous" and "Next" links at the bottom of each Rev News edition.

I also agree that removing the date from the URLs would help in some cases. It is informative to have the date as part of the URL though. So I am not sure we should change that. Maybe using symlinks or redirects both URLs could work?

Note that there were discussions recently about moving the whole site to git-scm.com, see #729. So not sure it's worth it to make a lot of changes these days.

[ayu-ch]

It is informative to have the date as part of the URL though

Right, but since the date is already included in the post itself, does it really need to be in the URL for context?

Symlinks or redirects would allow both formats to work, but the issue is that readers won’t know the shorter URL exists unless it’s explicitly mentioned somewhere.

[chriscool]

Right, but since the date is already included in the post itself, does it really need to be in the URL for context?

If one sees a bunch of URLs to some editions, having the date in the URL might help. For example we usually announce the selected GSoC contributors in the May or June edition, and the GSoC results in the September edition.

Symlinks or redirects would allow both formats to work, but the issue is that readers won’t know the shorter URL exists unless it’s explicitly mentioned somewhere.

Yeah, we should advertise the shorter URL properly, and maybe even use it in some places.

[ayu-ch]

If one sees a bunch of URLs to some editions, having the date in the URL might help.

That makes sense when browsing a list of links, but the dates are already present in the archive and within each edition itself. If someone is typing the URL manually, though, they’re unlikely to remember the exact date, which makes the current format harder to use.

[chriscool]

I agree that for manual typing no date is easier. I also agree that the dates are already present in the archive, so when browsing the archive, they might not be useful.

There are other use cases though. For example if someone writes a link in a new edition to a previous edition, and then someone else edits or reviews the new edition, it helps a bit to see the date in the URL. It can sometimes avoid the need to check where that URL points to.

There are often tradeoffs like this, and then there is also the cost of changing.

For example, if we decided to change that and remove the date in the URLs altogether, we would need to change all the past links and we could break links from other websites to some old editions.

[ayu-ch]

For example if someone writes a link in a new edition to a previous edition, and then someone else edits or reviews the new edition, it helps a bit to see the date in the URL. It can sometimes avoid the need to check where that URL points to.

I get your point here.

For example, if we decided to change that and remove the date in the URLs altogether, we would need to change all the past links and we could break links from other websites to some old editions.

But here, the redirects can work right (links with date can redirect to the 'no-date' url).

or no-date url can redirect to the links with date, but then, no one knows that no-date url exists.

[chriscool]

Yeah, redirects would be necessary, but first I am not sure we can easily have that.