Sgt_Kickaxe - 11:29 pm on Jul 5, 2010 (gmt 0)

No trailing slash on your home page is fine, browsers append it anyway and both give a 200 OK code.

A trailing slash is appropriate after any category or sub-level in the url.

No trailing slash, and even better a .htm or .html (or php etc..etc), is fine after the full url for your articles, there is no valid reason to make you final articles appear to be categories.

Just an added note for wordpress users, wordpress categories are broken (still) in the latest release. All url's have a /category/ in them by default and even if you remove that or replace it with a real category name it remains broken. visiting example.com/category/ results in a 404 error which is a fairly significant oversight (which is likely known and accounted for by search engines).

It is possible to fix wordpress categories but requires several modifications.