Usable file names
-----------------
I've thought about file naming schemes and choosing suitable names
on and off over the years, most recently in December when I was
setting up my gopherhole and phlog. I jotted down the beginnings
of this post in mid-January, and the past few nights I've been
spending a bit of time writing my current thoughts and opinions,
to finally put this out in the world, in case anyone else might
find this interesting or have any thoughts about it. If so,
I'd be very happy to hear from you about your thoughts on this,
whether it be in the context of file names of phlog/blog posts
and gopherholes/websites, other use-cases, or regular files in
general.
yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A date makes for a nice and short file name, but it doesn't convey
any information about what's in the file on its own. For example,
a file name 2020-07-13.txt tells me nothing about what is inside,
and I would need to open it to find out -- which I may not always
want to do, for one reason or another.
I feel like in the spirit of being able to tell what I'm getting
into before opening a gopher link (I'm thinking of the item type
prefix in URLs), I would also like to know what I can expect in a
file beyond its general type.
hyphenated-title
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Descriptive, hyphenated or single word file names are a favourite
of mine. I especially like to use them in collections where dates
don't matter as much, for example if the material in the files are
in a sense 'timeless' and can be expected to be maintained, kept
up-to-date, and/or remain relevant long after they are initially
written and published.
On my own gopherhole and website, my notes, talks, and generic
pages (e.g. contact page) follow this naming scheme. For example:
gopher://kelar.org/0/~bandali/talks/jami-empowers-users.txt
https://kelar.org/~bandali/talks/jami-empowers-users.html
gopher://kelar.org/0/~bandali/bandali-computing.txt
https://kelar.org/~bandali/bandali-computing.html
I prefer relatively short URLs for my gopherhole/website pages.
So, for each new page, I spend some time to come up with a concise
and descriptive page name/title, resulting in an equally short
file name. The file names can sometimes be further shortened,
by omitting articles like 'the', 'a', and 'an'.
As one may expect, this is a rather popular naming scheme, and
one that seems to be a naturally good fit for many use-cases.
I've come across many gopherholes and websites that use it for
the file names of various kinds of pages and/or entries.
My phlog post file names also initially used this scheme, but
within about a week of writing the first post I moved on to the
naming scheme described below.
[ Update: I'm back at using this for my phlog posts again.
-- 2023-07-08 ]
[ Update: I'm now using this for my articles, and
yyyy-mm-dd-hyphenized-title for my phlog posts again.
-- 2023-08-12 ]
[ Update: I'm back at using this for my phlog posts yet again.
-bandali, 22feb24. ]
yyyy-mm-dd-hyphenized-title or yyyymmdd-hyphenized-title
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a hybrid of the first and second naming schemes described
above. It is the one I use for this phlog, and more generally the
one I would use for other use-cases where the dates are important,
where the collection could be considered an excursion, a journey,
or a progression over time which inherently lends itself well to
being sorted and browsed chronologically.
[ Update: this is the naming scheme I used for my phlog posts for over
a year, but ultimately decided on using simply the hyphenated-title
(described above) for my phlog as well. My rationale is that
(1) I really like short URLs, and (2) I wasn't using the main
attraction of this approach to me, which automated generation of a
list of posts as described below. Instead, my 'index' files serve
as the source of truth for order of posts, and I'm okay with that.
-- 2023-07-08 ]
[ Update: I'm now using this naming scheme for my phlog posts again.
-- 2023-08-12 ]
[ Update: I'm using hyphenated-title again for my phlog too.
-bandali, 22feb24. ]
Before switching to yyyy-mm-dd-hyphenized-title file names for
these phlog posts, I briefly used yyyymmdd-hyphenized-title.
I like that the non-hyphenated yyyymmdd dates are two characters
shorter, and that not using a hyphen to separate the components
of the date resulted in the date looking as a single unit and be
visually more distinct from the (hyphenated) words that follow it,
but ultimately decided to go with hyphenated yyyy-mm-dd dates,
because they are easier to read due to the separation of their
parts, and that they are a more widely used and recognizable date
format in general.
Besides being easy to sort chronologically and being descriptive,
another benefit of this naming scheme is that it yields relatively
unique file names. This is especially useful in the context of
gopherspace, where one can easily save a copy of a phlog post for
reading later by simply downloading an entirely self-contained
plain text file -- in contrast to HTML pages, which may have
external dependencies such as external CSS. Having a descriptive,
dated file name helps the potential reader/visitor get an idea of
what it is generally about and when it was published before even
opening it, and the relative uniqueness means a lower probability
of collision with other files, should the reader choose to simply
download/save a copy.
Another useful aspect of this is automation. For instance, to
generate a list of my phlog posts in reverse chronological order,
I can fire up a terminal, cd (change directory) into the phlog
directory, and run
ls -1r | grep -v 'gophermap'
The '-1' switch to ls tells it to list one file per line, and '-r'
tells it to use reverse order while sorting. Finally, I exclude
the gophermap file (analogous to an index.html file for websites)
using an inverse grep ('-v' tells grep to select any line that
does not match the given argument, gophermap). This can be easily
extended and further formatted to fit whatever use-case at hand.
For example, adding the following line to a gophermap file for a
phlog in a gopherhole hosted by the Gophernicus gopher server
would insert a list of the phlog post files in that directory
into the gopher menu for that directory (the '=' in the beginning
tells Gophernicus to run the remainder of the line in a shell and
substitute the output into the gopher menu in its place):
=ls -1r | grep -v 'gophermap' | xargs -d'\n' printf '0%s\t\n'
Others
~~~~~~
Two unusual naming schemes I've seen around the gopherspace are
randomly generated names like tmp.gCHDzGlDqn as created by mktemp
from GNU coreutils, and Unix time like 1648258589 signifying the
number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (the Unix epoch).
I personally don't see myself using either of these for my own
posts or pages, but they're certainly interesting to see, and
no doubt the folks choosing to use them have their valid reasons.
For instance, perhaps, removing the burden of deciding on a more
descriptive file name altogether if a random one would suffice.
If you know of any other interesting and/or unusual file naming
schemes, or you'd like to share your thoughts about any of the
ones mentioned in this post, I'd be happy to hear from you;
you can find my email addresses at the end of the post.
Closing thoughts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In this post I outlined my thoughts and current opinions about
file names, particularly in the context of phlogs/blogs and
gopherholes/websites, and gave reasons as to why I think each
one may be more or less suitable for a particular use-case.
It is not my intention in any way to invalidate anyone or their
use-cases and choices when it comes to this, and as always my
inbox is open to thoughts, comments, feedback, and email from
you dear reader. :)
Take care, and so long for now.
bandali @kelar.org and @gnu.org