Try as I might I can’t stop reading Tom Coates at plasticbag.org. He has some thoughtful things to say about the new BBC R3 website and its URL design.
For those of you at the back not paying attention, this is about a careful effort to make sure that the valuable and often wonderful content the BBC makes available remains available.
Managing weblog URLs is a doddle in comparison to the things Tom & everyone else has had to consider. Every episode gets a page, not everything is repeated, date-based URLs won’t work for multiply repeated broadcasts. Should you consider episode numbers? Subject?
They’ve gone for a URL structure that hasn’t pleased everyone but as Tom says, they’re in it for the long haul and really are planning a URL structure to last a quarter of a century. By which time, presumably, Tom’s thoughts and Bach cantatas will appear spontaneously in my head at appropriate moments.
