LiveJournal, now with cool URLs
I have been scraping the syndicated version of my RSS feed on LiveJournal in order to add comments links to my articles (not that anyone does). They recently changed the format, so that (a) readers must click through to a second LJ page to find the link to click read the post itself, and (b) my scraper broke. But that’s their perogative, and offering a comment service to strangers who aren’t even LiveJournal members is hardly part of their core mission, so I cannot fault them for it!
They have also switched to using ‘cool’
URLs (in the
sense described by Tim Berners-Lee
in his Style
Guide to Online Hypertext) of the form
~pdc/1234.html rather than
talkread.bml?this=that&thother=1234. Apart from
making the URLs shorter, this change means that the mechanism
used to serve the files is now invisible, and can be altered
without having to change the URLs in future. It could even be
(gasp!) static files generated once a night when they scan
my RSS feed.