12 March 2022

Slugs...

...are one of the terms that have acquired multiple meanings in my shop. Beyond the traditional journalism meaning—a short, reusable, almost arbitrary, traditionally ALL CAPS handle for a story making its way through the editing process—we've also used "slug" to refer to the friendly label above the headline that sets some context for the reader. In What's making us happy, it's the "SPECIAL SERIES" tag. The main topic of the story is often used as the slug, unless we're on the landing page for that topic... and that's a long story. To avoid confusion, we're introducing the jaunty term "eyebrow" as a replacement. The new CMS that we're on the long road to adoption uses "slug" for the semi-legible part of a semantic URL, the "whats-in-a-slug" bit in the case of the Times article linked above. "Permalink text" is the suggested replacement, but I think we'll still have to slug it out.

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