URL as a sentence

URLs convey valuable information, and good URL design ensures that they provide the right level of context and set proper expectations. Incidentally, good URL design is something that is still lacking all over the internet, but that’s an observation for a future blog post.

Last year, I was thinking about maximizing the information contained in a URL. The thought experiment turned into a weird little personal project of practically zero significance, but I’m sharing it here because maybe someone will find it kinda cool? I don’t know.

I wondered about the idea of a URL being a complete sentence, and I picked up the domain newbold.is as the basis for my goofing around with the concept. I set up the subdomain adam, which made the start of a simple declarative sentence that might be reused countless times: ”Adam Newbold is”. And then I wired it up to my latest Statuslog entry via the omg.lol API, and configured it to always redirect to a URL derived from the text of the entry.

The end result is a URL that is a complete sentence, such as:

• adam.newbold.is/wondering-why-intelligent-grown-up-people-resort-to-name-calling
• adam.newbold.is/thawing-out-after-getting-holiday-lights-up-and-running-tonight
• adam.newbold.is/finally-coming-up-for-air-after-a-hectic-several-weeks-at-work

Visiting the site displays the same content displayed in the URL (except you do get some punctuation, which is nice). But with the same information in the URL, is visiting the site even necessary? And what’s the point of even having a website that consists of a single sentence? None, clearly, but it was fun to play around with this anyway!