I am debating slash pages. This website is a blog, or at least it aims to be. This time around, I didn’t just start blogging. No. I also got into reading other people’s blogs. I have a blogroll page where I list some of the ones I enjoy reading. This particular page, the blogroll, is was located under my domain, Jorisvandijk.com, then a forward slash / and then the name blogroll. Pages like this, pages under the main domain name right after the slash, these are called slash pages. At least they are in the blogosphere1 (what a word).
Anyway, I like clean design and minimalism. A place for everything and everything in its place. Currently the header of this website looks like this:
From left to right, the header contains the website URL, a home link, a tags link, a search link, the blogroll link, and a theme toggle. One of these seems out of place to me. The blogroll. Everything there is part of interacting with the website. Blogroll isn’t. It does not belong. Hell, I have a contact page which I put in the footer of the site because I felt it does not fit in well up there. Why blogroll then? I put it there because it couldn’t go anywhere else, really. Matt2 first told me about the blogroll and I really like that idea. It reminds me of the links page websites from a better era used to have. A thing my old websites always featured. I feel it’s great to link to stuff you like, so people that found and perhaps like your stuff can find stuff you like and in turn may like that.
Anyway, I believe my website needs this page. It has to have a place somewhere. The current location ain’t it.
When I learned about the blogroll, I didn’t yet know of the concept of slash pages. I found out through several blogs found on the blogosphere. Turns out, there’s a huge variety of common slash pages. Ranging from the useful, like a /about page, to the macabre with the /death page, or the totally pointless, like /hats, where one could describe or show all the hats they own. There’s so many, that a website3 exists that lists them.
So, I already have two of these slash pages for sure. I might as well change the menu item to something like more or slash or even /, and have a /slash (slash-slash page), where I list all the slash pages I have. I could add to these over time whenever I either find or invent new ones. I think I want to go this route, but I am unsure how to label it in a way that makes sense to both bloggers and non-bloggers, and which pages I should have. I mean, I am not going to make a death page, nor a hat one. I know that much. Fine. I have a single black baseball cap and when I die, I have a will.
