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 |
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
Project Examples
WordPress
WordPress (open source) supports the following permalink structures:
- Day and name
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http://example.com/2014/03/27/sample-post/
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- Month and name
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http://example.com/2014/03/sample-post/
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- Numeric
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http://example.com/archives/123/
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- Post name
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http://example.com/sample-post/
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- 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.
