Where did the blogging term ‘slug’ come from?
Today I was asked why ‘slug’ is used in Wordpress, and not the more familiar ‘URL’.
“URL” describes the whole string, which on ‘files and folders’ sites is:
protocol://server/directory/file.extention
CMS sites typically store data in a database instead of files, which allows multiple ‘views’ on the data. So the /directory/file.ext part of the URL tree is abstracted to provide a structured set of queries. A listing by date or category is common, such as:
protocol://server/year/month/day/name/option
protocol://server/category/subcategory/name/option
Which in real life might be a ‘printable’ version of a page:
http://conrad.com/2007/01/11/wordpress/print
and a RSS feed of a category of pages:
http://conrad.com/design/web/rss
With a file based website, there are 3 kinds of names in a page: the filename, the title tag, and the first h1 tag. With a CMS, there’s no filename, but a need for a short name to use in URLs.
That’s known as the ‘slug’, but I have no idea why.
Update: Conrad wrote to me:
At a guess, the term “slug” was not derived from shell-less gastropods… In Linotype’s version of hot-metal typesetting, a composed line of type was cast as a whole unit and this was called a “slug”. I think that by extension a line of identifying type placed beyond the trimmed page boundary was called a “slug”. The term is retained in InDesign, so may be an Americanism. And I guess the thing you call a slug is so called because it is an identifying line?
The Where did the blogging term ‘slug’ come from? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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