05 Feb 07 no-www

Simon Willison wrote an interesting entry on his blog the other day regarding disambiguated URLs. Simply put, ambiguous URLs are multiple URLs (e.g. Web addresses) which all point to the same resource. For example, you could try to reach this page using any of the following four:

• http://www.garethwestern.com
• http://garethwestern.com
• http://www.garethwestern.com/index.php
• http://garethwestern.com/index.php

The result is exactly the same, whichever you choose. Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, however, don’t know this, and so of those links would be saved individually, resulting in diluted rankings with regards to popularity. I have therefore decided to champion the cause of no-www.org, by changing this website to a “Class B”-compliance domain. All this means is that anyone who tries to visit http://www.garethwestern.com will be gracefully redirected to http://garethwestern.com. Magic!