Category: Comment

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.

This morning I woke in time to take in the “Terrorist Threat Report” on the TV, accompanied with the matter-of-fact explanation by the newscaster. Wow. Who’d of thunk it?

Weather reports are pretty much part of the package with a modern news update, but listing which cities in which continents are more likely to experience some unknown threat? That’s a whole different kettle of extremists.

This ain’t your daddy’s global political climate.

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)