Sometimes I look at this list of “slash pages” and I’m like ughkgh I love these, I should do like all of them. Then something stops me and I think I’ve figured out what it is. They seem more like blog post ideas to me than permanent (if occasionally updated) pages. For example /carry is one of the ideas:
a list of your every day carry items
That’s a neat idea. But if I did that, I think it makes more sense to me to write about what I carry around right now and if I did it again later, it doesn’t have to replace what I’ve written before. It would be interesting and worth preserving each time. For instance, I used to like a really specific small pocket knife (I guess I did blog it once). I don’t carry that anymore. No specific reason, but I like that that blog post is still there. I just don’t carry around all that much stuff. The only thing I’d put on the list right now is the Orbitkey Key Organizer. I’ve had that thing for ages and still quite like how it handles keys.
If I had a /uses page I feel like it would be a little predictable. I’m a lifelong Mac guy. I was a hard Mac nerd from about age 14 (1994) on, back when they were emphatically not cool, particularly among actual nerds. I’ve never once owned used any other kind of computer as my main machine. So you can assume I’m running a pretty modern Apple hardware and have surrounded myself with a generally all-Apple ecosystem, both hardware and software. (I say that, but all my home devices are Google-stuff, I’ll have to blog about that soon.) I also prefer Microsoft ergonomic keyboards, the Logitech MX Master 3S mouse, and this TV.
So anyway — slash pages are cool, but most of them also make great blog post ideas.
I’m reminded of /humans.txt, which was a play on the robots.txt file. I haven’t created one of those for many years, but I always enjoyed adding the names, roles, and brief bios of the actual humans who contributed to the creation of a site. Typically the file was added without permission or knowledge of the organization the site was created for, but I felt it deserved to be there, like an artist signing a painting.
Honestly, this is why I’ve never been interested in doing a Now page, let alone many of those other slash pages. Some do make more sense as a static page (like Chipotle), but most should just be a post tag instead so you can actually see the history of them.
Btw, the pocketknife post reminded me I used to do a This Is My series (https://chadcomello.com/tag/this-is-my/) spotlighting my random everyday items. Should pick that back up…
Why not convert all these slash pages into temporary redirects to your blog posts?
/carry would redirect to your most recent blog post about what you’re carrying.
/uses would redirect to your most recent blog post about what you’re using.
Even /about could redirect to the most recent biography post about yourself, but there would be numerous previous versions discussing you over the years.
Alternatively, you could redirect each slash page to a category page that lists all the blog posts in that category. For example, /carry would display a list of all carry pages. However, I prefer the idea of redirecting to the most recent /carry blog post and showing a list of previous /carry posts on the side.