About Choosing Good Names

What names?

When you upload pictures, or make a new gallery you have to fill in a 'Short Name' field. Later on this is used to make up the address of the thing you've added. For example, the 'Mary & Ashok's Wedding' gallery is at http://gallery.future-i.com/wedding/, because it was given the short name 'wedding' when it was created.

Now, if you choose to you can make up names like '154', '0594840', &c, and then we'll be no better off around here. However, this whole site is an attempt to use clean naming throughout. We're testing the belief as to whether or not it makes for a more useful site.

In your short names, you are restricted to using alphabetic characters, numbers, dashes and underscores ('_'). Personally I would avoid underscores, but some folk like them. I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve to help people who can't find the underscore key on their keyboard (go on, try - how would you tell just by looking at the key tops?).

What makes a good name?

Simple

It isn't as long as your arm, nor full of untypable gobbledegook

Expressive

It says what the item is. It may want to be a condensing of the title, or it might also include some of the description.

Makes sense in isolation

If someone looks at the whole address (e.g. http://gallery.future-i.com/wedding/pic:first-dance/) will it make some sense as to what the thing is or is about?

This is broadly in opposition to the first guideline, it pushes the complexity up.

It's also about more than just expressiveness, it needs to differentiate between this picture of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the next.

What else?

There is plainly more to this than that, and a better written piece should emerge eventually.

Is it useful?

So, I'm playing to test a firmly held belief - what's the point?

Looking at the hits coming in from Google and other search engines, I would say there's an obvious advantage in getting indexed well. it is plain to see that your ranking improves if you have addresses, descriptions and content which all match each other and what someone is looking for. More than that, I believe that it provides users with a better sense of where they are. There are certainly usability faults in gallery, but I think they are mainly in expecting people to read too much text, and in using terms which need explaining. I'm working to fix these, and find cleaner ways to represent what is quite complicated underneath.

Thanks to all of you who are choosing well.

— Ashok

Last updated on 2^nd January 2006.