Redirect paths with trailing slash

[gma]

If the same page can be served from two URLs that only differ by the presence/lack of a trailing slash, search engines can view the two URLs as separate pages. All pages served by Nesta for URLs that end with a slash should redirect to the URL without the slash.

See this article for background:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Reported by @nathanaeljones.

[lilith]

Always dropping the slash does simplify things, but it also makes relative paths difficult. I have several index pages with 20+ children, and the absolute paths add quite a bit of text.

What if the the trailing slash is used if the URL path exists as a directory on the filesystem? Would that convention complicate things? Or should it be configurable?

Or am I the only guy wanting a slash? Chime in!

[gma]

The idea of only dropping the slash for some pages hadn't even occurred to me. I appreciate the problem, but don't think that the solution should have an impact on the external interface of a site. The site author should deal with it, and the user shouldn't find themselves wondering why some URLs end in / and others don't.

With your proposal, if you were to create a file called pages/path.mdown the URL would end in /path. If you then decided to add a new page at /path/new-page the URL of /path would change to /path/. I don't like that much; I'd rather go to the trouble to update all my content to use page relative links (e.g. with sed).

To be honest, I don't use relative links at all and always use absolute URLs in my Markdown. It means that my links don't break if I change the URL of a page (which happened quite a bit when I was using relative links). I also use reference style links in my Markdown, so lengthy paths aren't a problem when included in the text.

[lilith]

I've also been thinking about that issue, and I agree - URLs should be all or nothing when it comes to slashes. Personally, I'd much prefer they all have slashes to none having slashes. I don't use fancy relative links, but I use a lot of relative links for direct children, which are less likely to break than absolute paths. Obviously relative links wouldn't work when embedded in another page, but that's kind of a separate issue.

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 1:08 PM, gma < reply@reply.github.com>wrote:

The idea of only dropping the slash for some pages hadn't even occurred to me. I appreciate the problem, but don't think that the solution should have an impact on the external interface of a site. The site author should deal with it, and the user shouldn't find themselves wondering why some URLs end in / and others don't.

With your proposal, if you were to create a file called pages/path.mdown the URL would end in /path. If you then decided to add a new page at /path/new-page the URL of /path would change to /path/. I don't like that much; I'd rather go to the trouble to update all my content to use page relative links (e.g. with sed).

To be honest, I don't use relative links at all and always use absolute URLs in my Markdown. It means that my links don't break if I change the URL of a page (which happened quite a bit when I was using relative links). I also use reference style links in my Markdown, so lengthy paths aren't a problem when included in the text.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/gma/nesta/issues/60#issuecomment-1998340

[gma]

On 5 Sep 2011, at 12:21, nathanaeljones wrote:

Personally, I'd much prefer they all have slashes to none having slashes.

I think it might be quite an easy to thing to turn on/off in app.rb. I'm hoping to have a look at this ticket later today and see how to do the non-slash version. I'll update this ticket with notes on how to do slashes everywhere if there's a nice way to do it.

[lilith]

Thanks. I'm working on nesta-plugin-aliases. I'm using page.abspath right now as the redirect target, but I'll probably need to change that based on whether slashes are enabled or not.

[gma]

Okay. I'll be stripping all slashes off the URLs when I get to fix the ticket. I've not tried the fix yet, but I'm thinking a Sinatra before filter might be the way to go.

[tuupola]

BTW. You do know that Sinatra now has url helper?

http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro#Generating%20URLs

[gma]

I hadn't seen that. Thanks. I did wonder where to() came from though (I just used it).