Apr. 18th, 2010

jack: (Default)
So, you're writing an email. Or committing a change to your program into the source control system. Or writing a blog post. Or editing a wiki. Or writing an academic paper. Or writing an article for a magazine[1]. Or, especially, you are including a hyperlink to another website.

This advice comes from someone who's been there. Don't mess around. GIVE IT A MEANINGFUL TITLE.

You'll think "oh, it's obvious what it is, it doesn't matter". But no. The vast majority of the time, if you ever revisit something you wrote a time ago, or if anyone else ever tries to read it, having a vaguely relevant title WILL MAKE LIFE 10,000 TIMES EASIER. Even if it's not useful the first time, I often find myself, for whatever reason, seeing a list of titles later, and if it's at least a little unique, it'll remind me later which is which.

It doesn't even matter if you can't encapsulate the whole thing, a title like "Links: flash version of xkcd U-shaped tetris and other links" is fine. But "links" is a bit useless if for some reason you later end up looking through old posts for a particular link you made.

It's also perfectly fine to add a joke title as well, but think about why you're doing it before you use an ironic title ONLY. If you intend the title ever to be useful, "Fixed stupid typo. Me undumbed meself!" is less useful than "Fixed stupid typo corrupting variable xxxx. Me undumbed meself!" If you're trying to capture people's interest and they haven't figured out the trick yet, or they don't read headlines anyway, using a cutesy joke title is useful to draw them in, but remember it may be less useful for other people.

Of course, it's entirely up to you. Many people never DO try to look back over any sort of history, and primarily email friends where all the content IS equally interesting, in which case you don't need this advice[2]. I'm just saying, it was useful FOR ME, and consider whether it would be useful to you, don't shy away from informative titles just because.

Specifically, I, and I think many other people, are often shy about putting a relevant title. They feel it'll seem boring or redundant. FWIW, I don't think anyone ever minds: a useful title is at worst neutral, I think it's never harmful.

[1] Except that in this case, it probably won't be under your control.
[2] A particular example is posting links to "this seems cool!" I find it incredibly useful if the link says WHICH flash game or WHICH parody article it is, but that's partly because of the way I browse, I know other people apparently don't.
jack: (Default)
Someone at my party incautiously asked what the surname of the royal family is. Fortunately I couldn't remember much of the history at the moment, but then I went to look for a summary. This is extremely non-accurate, but I just wanted to give the general idea that it's all surprisingly vague and inconsistent.

As far as I was able to work out from wikipeida and the straight dope article, the royal family often belongs to a royal house with a different name than their nominal surname, if any. The originally Scottish Stuarts were comparatively simple -- or at any rate, any complexity in their surname was not recorded prominently on wikipedia. But then all the convenient male heirs had their heads chopped off, died, converted to catholicism, fled England, abdicated, or some combination of the above. I'll try to skip over all of the Lord-Protector-Cromwell and Old-Pretender-James and William-and-Mary-of-Orange and so on.

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But I hope it's clear that, while I don't fully understand it, I am sceptical of anyone who makes simple, sweeping pronouncements on the the way it is. (I'm in broad agreement to anyone who says it doesn't matter much and the Queen can go by whatever she likes, but the traditions are not detailed enough for there to be one necessarily correct answer.)

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