The permalink structure for the posts on this blog are like: https://elliot.my/1234.

I like it because it’s short. And this blog is for short posts. It works.

However, the number comes from the post_id. And it just doesn’t feel very resilient if I have to backup and restore this blog on a new server, for example. In my head the post_id will be different.

Apparently it won’t be an issue though. It’s stored in the blogs WordPress MySQL database. So if I can restore the blog and its posts, then I can restore the post_id‘s too. So I guess I’m comfortable with that.

However, if I can’t restore the blog automatically due to some sort of awful data loss, and have to restore more manually I might be in trouble.

Because if the structure is like https://elliot.my/2024/10/18/title-of-post it’s fairly easily to manually recreate, as long as I know the date and title of the post.

Or let’s say I want to move this blog off WordPress onto Hugo. Hugo will easily create URLs that match, again going off the date and title.

But with https://elliot.my/1234 I’m going to have to manually tell it what the permalink is.

I’m probably worrying about nothing. It’s unlikely I’m going to ever manually restore this blog. If I do, I’ll probably have bigger things to worry about.

The post_id still makes me nervous. But I’m going to keep using it, as I like the short URLs.

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One more thing. The post_id isn’t really a post ID. Every media upload and post revision/draft has a post_id too.

My last blog post had an ID of 433. The one before that 430. As I’d obviously hit ‘Save draft’ a few times.

A concern I had was how quickly the number would climb. If it’s the four hundreds after 28 posts and 8 days, what will the number be in 1 year? Or 5 years?

Assuming a similar pace:

• After one year: around 20,000.
• After five years: around 100,000.

I think having a six digit ID after five years is fine. I mean Twitter has 20 digits or so.