The gist is to include “status blocks” at the top of many/most pages, inside pop-open blocks, i.e. the little triangle thingy like at the top of this page.
Content Statuses
Statuses are like this, so far (might change):
PLACEHOLDER – No real content, just scope more or less defined.
DRAFT – Rough to near done, but in any case at least the gist of the expected content is there.
WIP – “Work in Progress”. I’m using this, for now, for longer pages with sections, where some parts are “done”.
DONE – No further editing planned or expected, but one never knows.
PLACEHOLDER and DRAFT content include those markers in the title, so it shows in the links.
WIP is not included in titles, since there’s at least some “DONE” content there, and sections will show what’s what.
DONE of course isn’t shown in the title, as it’s the default state, really.
Permalinks and Revisions
I’m using a system modeled loosely on the RFC system on which the internet is based.
This probably seems bizarre to non-engineers for “personal content management” but I’ve been creating and managing structured information for half a century and it’s what works for me. I’m doing it in a way that I believe will be more or less invisible to people who couldn’t care less about it.
The problem this addresses is a general lack of content stability. I find it annoying that a link to something may, over time, refer to something quite different, or to nothing at all. Part of the original vision for the internet was to handle all this as a matter of course, but it never really happened, so most content is loosey goosey and morphs this way and that at random.
The key notion is that once a page is created, the scope (purpose, topic, etc.) doesn’t change. Each such page has a unique ID number (currently assigned by WordPress for its internal database record), from which I publish permalinks, like RTM306 (for this page). A URL like https://richardminner.com/RTM306 will always take you to that page, and the “meaning” of that page won’t change.
Once a page gets to a “DONE” state, I will generally never change the content at all, other than perhaps some trivial typo corrections. Instead, if I want to update it, I’ll make a new Revision page that “obsoletes” the previous page, a la RFCs.
I haven’t quite decided what to do with title-based URLs, like https://richardminner.com/about/content-status-and-tracking. I might make those stable as well (in which case the RTMnnn permalinks are somewhat redundant), or I might have them take you to the Latest Revision. Or something else, we’ll see. The point is that a “title” isn’t really intrinsic to a given blob of content, so it’s nice to be able to change it freely. On the other hand, “ID-only” URLs are rather opaque.