Frequently, while reading blogs — or sites such as tamingemail.com — I come
across links called “permalinks.” I figure this must be some sort of special
link to which other bloggers can refer that won’t “break.” But what puts the
“perma” in the permalink? Why is it different from any other link?
That stumped me too, when I first entered the world of blogging. I mean, a
link’s a link, right?
Well, yes, and no. But mostly yes.
Among other things, it’s a helpful reminder of what you might want to link
to, if you want that link to be meaningful a month or a year from now.
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The nature of web logs, or “blogs” is that the home page contains some
number of recent entries in reverse-chronological order. When a new entry is
posted on the blog, the oldest one on the home page “falls off” the bottom.
While that model’s not exclusive to blogs, and actually pre-dates modern
blogging software, it’s become the pseudo-standard behavior for blogs; so much
so that many people might consider it part of the definition of a blog.
Recently blogging software has also come in to common use to build sites
that aren’t actually web logs, including Ask
Leo! and Taming
Email, among many, many others. But the model is the same – articles (or
article excerpts) are on the home page, until they scroll off the bottom.
it’s the permalink you’ll want to use…”
The problem is that when someone sees an article on a website’s home page
that they like or want to send to someone else, emailing the link to the home
page only works for a while. Eventually the article of interest scrolls off the
page.
Hence the permanent link, or permalink.
Even for sites that publish the full content of each article on the home
page, such as Taming
Email does, each article is also published on its own page, with a link
that is permanent. As I write this, Taming Email has an article entitled “The
Most Under-Used Key on Your Keyboard” on the home page. When that article
scrolls off the home page, it will remain available on its own page:
“http://www.tamingemail.com/the_most_underused_key_on_your_keyboard.html” – its
permalink.
Thus a “permalink” is simply the pointer to that page. When linking to an
article on a blog or blog-like site, it’s the permalink you’ll want to use, not
the link to the site’s home page.
Other than that … yes, it’s really just a link like any other. :-)
hello i am going onto my msn and i am typing in mi useer name and the right password and tobleshoot is coming up and not letting me onto msn can u help me cos i want to talk to mi mate plz help me plz
Leo you must have a really high page rank for hotmail and msn help because these people just keep coming…It confuses the heck out of me. How do they expect you to help? lol