I finally got around to fixing the permalink structure on this blog today, by implementing “pretty URLs”. WordPress caters for this very well, but I had problems with the way my hosting service deals with .htaccess files, trying to force script me into making directories password protected. I also wanted to make sure that existing links to the old numbered permalinks wouldn’t get broken by the process of renaming to the like of “http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2006/12/07/tornado-hits-london/” from what used to be the ugly URL: “http://distributedresearch.net/blog/?p=192”
For those reading via RSS or aggregators, the process may have caused the 10 most recent posts to be repeated as unread, I’m sorry about that.
Oh, and there’s also a speech synthethiser “podcast’ version of the text in each post, courtesy of talkr which Linda asked for on Acting to Improve. It’s an interesting experiment listening to a mechanical female voice trying to read what I’ve written but I’m not sure if I should keep it. What do you think?
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
Please report to your blog software developer the bug that you cannot preserve old URLs in feeds (and so avoid the repeated post problem).