permalink

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A permalink is a URL which typically represents and retrieves a single post (also explicitly called a post permalink).

Contents 1 Why 2 How 2.1 Design 3 IndieWeb Examples 3.1 Barnaby Walters 3.2 gRegor Morrill 4 Project Examples 4.1 WordPress 5 Coping with loss of 5.1 archive page with old permalinks in cleartext 5.2 new URLs with old permalinks in path 6 Changing Permalinks to posts 7 See also

Why

You should maintain permalinks to your posts so links to them keep working. This is the intent of "Cool URIs [sic] don't change"[1].

How

Design

Most projects have a very deliberate permalink URL design.

IndieWeb Examples

Barnaby Walters

Barnaby Walters uses Taproot running on waterpigs.co.uk:

• Articles
  • http://waterpigs.co.uk/articles/getting-started-with-microformats2/
• Notes
  • . . .

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill using ProcessWire on gregorlove.com:

• Permalinks begin with the year and month /YYYY/MM/ followed by the slug
  • http://gregorlove.com/2015/07/100-words-027/

Project Examples

WordPress

WordPress (open source) supports the following permalink structures:

• Day and name
  • http://example.com/2014/03/27/sample-post/
• Month and name
  • http://example.com/2014/03/sample-post/
• Numeric
  • http://example.com/archives/123/
• Post name
  • http://example.com/sample-post/
• Custom structure
  • Using a combination of WordPress structure tags

Coping with loss of

Permalinks die every year. If you're able to export your content you can rehost it on your own site, but the problem of dead permalinks remains. There are approaches to making dead permalinks at least discoverable, e.g. by searching for the text of a permalink URL in a web search engine.

archive page with old permalinks in cleartext

One approach is to publish an archive page that provides cleartext URLs (but not hyperlinked) of your dead permalinks, along with their new locations, e.g.:

• Jon Udell's 2002-2006 index of his blog posts that were originally published at weblog.infoworld.com/udell.

new URLs with old permalinks in path

Another approach is to create new pages with URLs that have the old permalinks as part of their path, and then also link to those new URLs from an archive page using link text of the old domain and path . E.g.:

• microformats tr.im equivalents for shortlinks at the now defunct tr.im link shortener. E.g.:
  • microformats.org/wiki/tr.im/ufprs for the dead link tr.im/ufprs

Changing Permalinks to posts

When restructuring the permalink design on an indiewebsite, it is recommended to send an HTTP 301 permanent redirect response from the older permanlink to the newer one (see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Response_codes ).

Such a redesign can affect other aspects of an indiewebsite some of which are documented below

• If comments and responses to a post are identified using the post permalink, then these should be updated to point to the new permalink.

• Posts on other websites might still link to the old permalink and might send webmentions to it. The webmention receiving code should suitably recognize these as webmentions to the new permanlink.

• Bridgy using posse-post-discovery might resend some backfeed webmentions to the new permalink. These should be suitably de-dupped.

See also

• permashortlinks
• IndieArchive
• posts
  • notes
  • articles
• short-domains
• slug