Saturday, October 09, 2004

Bloggler's Potemkin Permalinks

This is the "permalink" to a post in my test blog (authored using blogger).

Test Blog: OriginalName

Here's the "permalink" after I edited the subject line in the above post.

Test Blog: NewName

Try both. The first now fails. The second will work until I revise the subject line.

These are not Permalinks -- they are Potemkin Links. They look "permanent", but they're fake.

Blogger doesn't support true Permalinks on their post pages.

This is a poor practice. Blogger is encouraging widespread broken links.

There are at lest two things they could do instead:

1. Blogger supports true permalinks on non-post page blogs. They should create a new template tag that would support these old-style in-context links. I prefer in-context permalinks anyway.

2. Blogger could support indirection, so the old link would redirect to the new link.



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