stable ids for gardens

[kgjenkins]

Consider adding an opaque id to the front matter of each garden, and see if there is a way to keep the place hierarchy in the directory structure (and even the file names), but the public URLs would use the gre_id for a shorter, more stable URL that would act as a permalink for citation, and would look something like:

• https://roman-gardens-github.io/garden/12345

instead of:

• https://roman-gardens.github.io/province/judaea/caesarea_maritima/byzantine_law_court_and_roof_garden/

Potential benefits:

• Stable garden URLs (even if the province/place hierarchy were modified later)
• Shorter garden URLs (easier to type correctly)
• Better integration with other linked data applications

Potential implementation:

• Add gre_id or slug to front matter (or use existing article_id that is currently unused?)
• Use Hugo permalink or slug functionality
• Ideally, unique ids would be generated automatically. See if there is any way to automatically add an id via archetypes/default.md, either as a auto-increment integer id, or else a random string id that will be unique.

[kgjenkins]

One complication would be links between gardens. Right now, it is easy to link to other gardens in the same directory, since Atom makes it easy to see those filenames. Using ids might make that harder.

If this proposal ends up not being possible, a fallback would be to publish an id-based permalink on each garden page, and set up Hugo to run a redirect from the permalink (.../garden/12345) to the filename-based URL (.../province/judaea/caesarea_maritima/byzantine_law_court_and_roof_garden/).

[kgjenkins]

Christian made the great suggestion that we could hash the URL to get a unique ID. If the script only adds such article IDs when they don't already exist, then there shouldn't be any problem moving or renaming a file.

[kgjenkins]

I have a garden-ids branch that does the following:

• Uses random 10-digit hexadecimal strings for ids. (This is sufficiently unique. Even if we created 10,000 gardens, the chance of getting a duplicate id would be 0.0045%)
• Assigns a gre_id to existing gardens.
• Automatically adds a gre_id when a new garden is created using hugo new province/name/sublocation/garden.md
• Displays a permalink at the top of each garden (we can change how this looks, if desired)
• Uses hugo aliases to automatically redirect from the permalink to the actual garden.

And, finally, the main reason for doing all of this...

• If a garden markdown file is renamed or moved to a different directory, the permalink remains the same and continues to redirect to the new location. This will be very important for any future linked data integrations!

I currently have this branch published to the test website..

Here is the full URL of a garden: https://roman-gardens.github.io/gre-website-test/province/africa_proconsularis/pupput/house_of_the_black_and_white_triclinium/

And here is the permalink: https://roman-gardens.github.io/gre-website-test/id/b758b14e74

On the public site, these URLs will be even shorter (although this one doesn't work yet until we publish to the public website): https://roman-gardens.github.io/id/b758b14e74

[kgjenkins]

p.s. I didn't use the Hugo permalink feature for this, because it broke relative links to images, etc. Using Hugo aliases that redirect to the full URL works much more smoothly.

[kgjenkins]

And if we like this, we'll want to

• [ ] update the "how to cite" page

[kgjenkins]

I've re-published the garden-ids to the test website, so the links above should work again.