Picking a short link slug people might remember
Random slugs are fine for Slack. For anything you'll say on a podcast, pick the word first.
Default short links exist because machines don't care about spelling. Humans sometimes do, especially when you're on a podcast trying to sound smooth.
A host I listen to — won't name him, he's fine — said "go to myurl dot su slash..." and then read eight random characters from a screenshot on his second monitor. He stumbled twice. Paused. Read it again slower. Listeners never found the page. I checked the comments. Chaos.
Good slugs I've seen in the wild: menu, vinyl, office-hours. Bad: spring_sale_final_v2_REAL because you will typo it on a sticker at 1am. Cute but fragile: gr8-deal-4-u on a phone call is pain for everyone involved.
Lowercase. Underscores are death when you say them out loud — "spring underscore sale" is not a vibe.
Read the slug aloud once before you print anything. If you stumble, shorten it. I do this in the car like a weirdo and it saves reprints.
login, api, blog are blocked because they're site routes. If menu is taken try cafe-menu or daria-menu. First come on the shared domain, same as email addresses back in the day.
Random slugs are perfect for internal Slack, one-off invoices, links you'll delete tomorrow. Custom aliases are for stuff sitting in your bio for months, which is why they're account-only here — guests get random, registered users get to pick. Fair trade.
Treat it like naming a file you'll see again in six months. Boring and clear beats poetry. I have a link called tax-stuff-2025 and I'm not proud of it but I always know what it is.