Naming a file, while seemingly an easy task has a number of nuances to it. Here are some tips to improve your file naming.
A rose by any other name, would smell just as sweet but would be more difficult to locate.
Use all lowercase letters
A combination of upper and lowercase letters in a file name makes for easy typos in urls. Windows servers by default are case-insensitive but the W3C standards group says urls should be case-sensitive and this is the behavior on most *nix servers.
Minus signs instead of spaces or underscores
Spaces in urls get encoded to %20, which makes for messy and confusing urls so we replace them with a character. Underscores can get lost when a filename is underlined so minus signs are used in place of spaces.
Dates
If you need to include a date, please:
- put the date at the beginning of the file name
- use the format YEAR-MONTH-DAY
- use 4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day
examples:
2014-12-25-example-file.pdf
2014-07-31-example-file.pdf
One of the advantages of this format is, when sorting alphabetically these files will be chronological.
Note: The official name for this date format is International Date Standard ISO8601.
Photo credit Quinn Dombrowski
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