Warning: Boring Post ahead.

Jesse, over at Pandagon, is sporting a spiffy new design. Go check him out. (He's a lefty political blogger, for those unfamiliar with him.) His redesign has me thinking a bit about permalinks, and the fact that there's no real convention out there for how to do them.

Jesse's permalinks used to be the actual titles of the posts, but now he's changed that to a time stamp, which is probably the most common method out there. I used to have time stamps, but I didn't like them; my thinking was that nobody cares what time I posted something, and the only way it could be useful is as an alibi in a murder case ("Judge Ito, I couldn't possibly have done in Ron and Nicole, because my blog clearly shows two posts entered at the time of the murders!" "Ah, I see. Bailiff, release him!"). So I did away with the time stamp and changed my permalinks to the phrase "link this entry", which struck me as the best way to do it.

The problem I have with permalinks, on most blogs, isn't that there are so many different ways of doing them, but that in many cases it's not obvious at all where the permalink is. For many bloggers, as I note above, it's the time stamp. But many do something else: Steven Den Beste, for example, uses a small graphic of two chain links, above the entry and next to the time stamp, which is appropriate enough except that the "link" icon doesn't appear in the color of SDB's usual hyperlinks, so unless one directly mouses over it, one doesn't know that icon links to anything. Oliver Willis's permalinks are at the end of the post, also next to the time stamp, but really hard to see: it's a single plus-sign that can be easily overlooked.

The worst, though, are the LiveJournal blogs that I read, such as Bara's and Paul Riddell's. For these, the permalink is actually the link to an entry's comments, which contain the text of the entry and the comments (kind of like your standard Movable Type blog, when you load a specific article instead of the blog's main page), but in many cases this screen uses a default LiveJournal set-up, instead of whatever design tweaks that the blogger has made to his or her main-page template.

So, there are my half-baked thoughts on permalinks. Anyone still reading this post deserves a gumdrop.