A slug is an address, not a name

For most of this project's life, a post without a title had two names. Its own page called it by its date. Everything else — the browser tab, the link card somebody shares, every item in the feed — called it burtiky-opekame-hipstamatic-oggl-jane.

That is not a corner case. On the archive this engine is measured against, 2,754 posts of 4,418 carry no title. Sixty-two per cent of a site, going out into the world under an address.

A slug is made out of the words. It is not the words.

A slug is a machine's answer to "where does this live": lowercased, stripped of diacritics, joined with hyphens, cut to the first eight words. Every property that makes it a good address makes it a bad name. It has no capitals, no punctuation, and no idea where the sentence it was cut from was going.

1.5 takes the name from the same place the slug came from — the post's own opening — and stops in a better place.

Where it stops

A whole first sentence wins when one fits a window of four to twelve words, because a name that ends where the writer ended reads like a name. Failing that, the first eight words, which is exactly what slugs have always been cut to, so a post's name and its address stay recognisably the same post.

The sentence window is there for a reason a Czech archive teaches quickly. A Czech sentence puts its verb and its object at the end, so eight words usually stop just before the point. Where the sentence is short enough to take whole, taking it whole is the better cut.

One cut, not two. When the eighth word is a preposition or a conjunction it is dropped — "…vyplynulo, že" reads as a mistake where "…vyplynulo," reads as an interruption — and the dropped word then opens the rest of the text rather than disappearing between the halves. Whatever is on either side of a cut has to add back up to what was there.

What does not change

The heading on the post's own page is still the date it has been since 1.3. A post that never claimed a title is not handed one where its author would see it; it is handed one where a stranger has to recognise it — the tab, the card, the feed, the announcement.

And a post with a real title is untouched. This only ever fills a hole.