Yearly Archives: 2003

The curse of permalink

Tuesday November 25th 2003

What is a permalink?

It’s a blogging term meaning that the URI linked to the text will provide a permanant link to a particular journal entry.

Why do they suck?

Because when search engines like Blogdex or Google index the pages of blogs they scan the content for links, picking up lots of links consisting of the word “permalink”, amongst others. Now, if the permalink contains the title of the post, or even date of the entry, e.g. “journal entry on 25th November 2003”, it would make a lot more sense. It shows that the link is related to the text of the link, which is more logically correct than an unrelated made–up word.

Permalink has become prolific throughout the web, due mostly to blogs running on off the shelf publishing systems which the non–technically gifted end user will be ill at east to tamper with, save to alter a few background colours and change some images.

This means that the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there are failing to have noteworthy posts indexed in a proper and correct way. Search for the word Permalink and you’ll get a whole load of pages containing url’s with the word permalink. The results page probably wont contain any information about the word, it’ll be random fragments of popular blog pages most recently indexed.

However, even worse than permalink is the hip designer group of colons, you know, like ::: that even Jeffrey “should know better” Zeldman sports on his site. It’s all very well preaching semantic mark-up and standards compliance, but when you commit the permalink crime in an even stupider way, it’s kind of hard to keep that healthy sheen of perfection from being tarnished.

If you have a journal of your own and it permalinks with that word (or something equally as meaningless), go and have a look at changing the resultant link into something more meaningful, for the sake of the search engines as well as yourself.

Another successful trip to Scotland

Tuesday November 18th 2003

What can I say, other than the journey to and fro’, we have this whole trip back to Scotland thing down to a tee.

We arrived on Thursday night in enough time for me to get a Mr Kebab speciality… which was fantastic. Man, if I ever win the lottery I’m going to have Mr Kebab food couriered from Helensburgh to where ever I’m living it up in the world. Skating in San Diego? No problemo, have the Mr Kebab chef’s flown over and they can cook me up a tasty donner during the flight!

Seriously, though – the food was ace… and not just because I was starving after a four hour drive, either. Even Fliss got a burger from them, so that’s a seal of approval right there.

Friday we got down to the point of the weekend with Andrew’s birthday. He got a few odds and ends to accompany his Silver PlayStation 2 that I managed to snap up for him during the previous afternoon. This went down very well, in fact the rest of the weekend revolved around the awesome TimeSplitters 2, Burnout 2, and Rumble Racing (which is a bit dated now, but still plays well and Andrew enjoys it.) For lunch, Crazy Uncle John took us to the Indian restraunt on the sea front for what must have been the most average chicken tikka masala I’ve ever had. Mental note – never go back there, they aren’t even qualified to tie up the aprons of the Mr Kebab chef dudes.

Saturday we took Fliss‘ dad to a hardware store to get stuff for doing up the house. Sadly, when we got to the house I managed to royally screw up the tiling of the kitchen floor. I only had a couple of hours before I had to call it quits for Andrew’s birthday night out thing, and didn’t really think it through properly. I feel kind of bad about the result… I mean, when you tell folk “oh, I just started in the corner…” it’s like everyone’s a fucking tiling expert who comes out of the woodwork after the event. If I hear one more time that I should have started in the middle, I’ll be shoving a tile where the Sun doesn’t shine.

Whoah! Ted – you totally knocked yourself out for hours!

Tuesday November 11th 2003

Yeah, I went to see that movie at the weekend, but unlike most other journal sites and their dogs, I’m not going to write a review of it. Jeremy made a good job of summing things up already, and I agree with him for the most part.

It’s funny how so many people seem offended by the way the movie unfolded. Did they not spot the rampant commercialism in the second film? Or the half assed video game that spent the summer performing daylight robbery along with Ms Croft on the shelves of stores all over the planet?

When it was that obvious the Wachowski’s were cashing in, all you could really do was enjoy a fabulously crafted action movie. The story, the Matrix universe – whatever you want to call it, became the padding between the set pieces from the moment Reloaded burst onto the silver screen.

The only green–tinted flickering hiding the real world from the Wachowski brothers is caused by the torrent of hundred dollar bills raining from the skies above them. I can picture it now… smug little fuckers standing there, faces filled with glee as the camera pans around them – the shower of dead presidents suspended in bullet time.

At least there’s a funny side to it :o)