Update update

I’ve just made a couple of small administrative changes to phonoloblog that are worth noting here.

First, if you look to the sidebar on the right, right below the “join phonoloblog!” link, you’ll see a new list of contributors link. This is a link to an alphabetical list of everyone who has contributed at least one post (not just a comment) to phonoloblog, with links to their posts and to their personal websites. (Note to contributors: the links to your posts will be automatically updated, but not the links to your websites. If those change, please let me know.)

Second, I finally figured out how to change the structure of permalinks. It used to be that each post on phonoloblog had URLs like this, where “xxx” is the “post id”, a monotonically-increasing number corresponding to the post’s order in the sequence of posts:

https://quote.ucsd.edu/blogs/phonoloblog/index.php?p=xxx
https://quote.ucsd.edu/blogs/phonoloblog/wp-trackback.php?p=xxx

(That second URL is the “trackback” link. Go here if you’d like to know what trackbacks are.)

The above types of URLs will still work, but now the following types of URLs will be the ones “officially” listed on phonoloblog — i.e., these are the types of links that you will follow to read each post.

https://quote.ucsd.edu/blogs/phonoloblog/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-slug/
https://quote.ucsd.edu/blogs/phonoloblog/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-slug/trackback/

As should be obvious, “yyyy” corresponds to the year, “mm” to the month, and “dd” to the day of the post. The “post-slug” is an automatically-generated “sanitized” string based on the title of the post; for example, the title of one of my recent posts is “Should I be surprised?”, for which the post-slug is “should-i-be-surprised” — no capitals, no punctuation.

Note to authors: you can edit your post-slugs independently of your titles, though there’s no particular reason to do so in most cases. Also, if you happen to edit your post title after you have published the post, the post-slug will remain the same as it was originally (unless, of course, you also edit the post-slug). There’s a good reason for this: since the post-slug is part of the URL of the post, changing it will change the post’s URL. If someone links to your post and you change the post-slug, the URL will no longer work. So, the basic moral: if you can help it, don’t edit your post-slugs or titles after you’ve published your posts.

NOTE: I just realized that my changes to the permalinks has also affected other links on the site, most important among them the RSS feed addresses for posts and comments. Those of you who subscribe to either or both of those feeds may have noticed the interruption of service; I apologize for the inconvenience.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *