The Lost Chord: On the URL You Couldn't Hum
I was trying to tell my father how to find something on my website. This was years ago, back when I still considered ‘having a website’ a primary personality trait. Over the phone, I walked him through the homepage, the main menu, the section I called ‘Field Notes.’ He was quiet, the kind of quiet that means the mouse pointer is circling the screen like a confused insect. “Just go to the direct link,” I finally said, my voice tinged with that particular impatience of the tech-savvy explaining the self-evident. “It’s the site, slash, notes, slash, twenty-twenty, dash, zero-nine, dash, the-dream-of-the-heron.”
A Tune Without Melody
The silence that followed was different. It wasn’t a navigational silence. It was the silence of a man being asked to recite a random string of numbers and hyphens from memory. “Say that again?” he asked, not with frustration, but with genuine bafflement, as if I’d just asked him to recall the serial number on a kitchen appliance we owned in 1997. I repeated it, slower, feeling the absurdity of each syllable. The-dream-of-the-heron. It was a title I was proud of, a poetic fragment. But as a component of a URL, recited aloud, it wasn't poetry. It was a password. It was a tune without a melody, impossible to hum.
That moment stuck with me. We talk about URLs as addresses, as pathways, as signals. But we rarely talk about them as mnemonic devices—or, more accurately, as their failure. My entire site structure, my careful taxonomy, my internal linking web… it all collapsed in that phone call into a single, harsh reality: if a human you love can't remember how to get back to something you made, the structure has failed a fundamental test. It was a vanity of organization, a map that only made sense to the cartographer. The ‘heron’ post was buried three clicks deep in a logic that felt intuitive only because I had built the labyrinth.
I spent the next week obsessively reworking my URL scheme. Not for crawlers, but for my father. For the imaginary friend I was explaining the site to. Could this path be sung? Was there a rhythm to it? I killed the serial-number dates. I flattened hierarchies. I turned ‘mysite.com/notes/2020/09/the-dream-of-the-heron’ into something simpler, something that could be carried in the mind: ‘mysite.com/heron-dream.’ It felt rebellious, almost sacrilegious to ditch the chronological archive. But it was necessary. A URL should be a clue, not a cipher.
Now, whenever I design a site structure or craft a redirect plan, I think of that phone call. I whisper the URLs to myself. Could I give someone directions to this page in a noisy bar? If the internal links vanished, would the URL itself offer a breadcrumb back home? The goal isn't just to prevent 404s, but to create paths that linger in memory. The best URL isn't just canonical; it's a little bit musical. It's the one you can hum in the dark, and find your way back.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: