Article URLs week: Day 1

Welcome to the first day of Article URLs week. I’m going to be judging news sites’ article URLs on readability, brevity, cleanliness, hierarchy, and permanence.

Each URL will get an A through F letter grade. I will reduce a given URL’s grade for containing redundant “garbage” (marked as deleted text), being obviously impermanent, or using numbers rather than words to identify articles. I will increase its grade for being hackable or using hierarchical year/month/day dates. Let’s get started:

• Ohio.com: B+

  http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/entertainment/music/6363976.htm

  Knight Ridder sites include the redundant mld and the site name, but the URL is hackable to the music and entertainment pages.
• mcall.com: C

  http://www.mcall.com/news/local/
all-a1_5hitjul28,0,942775.story?coll=all-news-hed

  I think either the slug (hitjul28) or the number (942775) could be removed in addition to the other junk. The URL is hackable to local but not to news.
• azcentral.com: B

  http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0728military28.html

  This site uses excellent, meaningful slugs and is hackable, but without a year in the URL, it clearly isn’t permanently unique.
• TimesDispatch.com: C

  http://www.timesdispatch.com/frontpage/MGBRN4LTNID.html

  The alphanumeric article IDs are pretty ugly. frontpage is not a good section name, and it’s not hackable.
• NewsOK.com: D-

  http://www.newsok.com/cgi-bin/show_article?
ID=1053607&pic=none&TP=getarticle

  This isn’t a total F, because it would be possible to have even more garbage, but it’s still pretty bad.

On Tuesday we’ll hunt for some URLs worthy of As and Fs.