I’m late to this particular usability party, but I just realized in converting to WordPress that permalinks are part of the user interface of a website. It didn’t initially seem problematic to me to mindlessly stick “.html” as the suffix to every WordPress permalink so as to get a little backward compatibility with my Blogger past, but a comment from Justin on my Blogger to WordPress instructions made me rethink that. As a longtime Windows user, I like to see filename extensions. But there’s no reason my blog readers need to see “.html” when they browse or link to a particular post. So I’ve eliminated the .html from my WordPress permalinks and I’ll handle old Blogger links via Apache’s mod_rewrite, which allows URLs to be rewritten as they come in. Fortunately Justin has provided even more details on how to do that, because my own experimentation this morning resulted in much learning about mod_rewrite, the Apache web server on Mac OS X, and regular expressions but no actual stripping of the .html suffix. When I get it working I’ll update my instructions.
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About Anne
Anne Truitt Zelenka is a web technologist turned high school math teacher. She is the author of Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working. She writes about family at The Everyday Cafe. Read more about Anne.
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3 Comments
Keep going with this line of thinking, Anne. Consider it in the context of your recent “Web 2.0″ vs. WS-* musings.
There’s no such thing as “files” or “CGI scripts” or “app servers” or “services” or “APIs” on the web - it’s resources all the way down, with links between resources and a contract for how resources should act and interact. “Web 2.0″ seems to me the mass realization of this simple truth.
Consider the concept of a “permalink” in the context of an inventory or CRM system. If every noun in these systems had a “permalink” and their relevant information could be retrieved using HTTP, could you then switch inventory systems in the same basic manner that you switch blogging systems? Wouldn’t PHP seem a good candidate for exposing these resources assuming it had hooks into the underying systems? Where are the “Services” (e.g. the S part of WS-*) in this architecture? How do you “invoke” things? How do you “describe” things?
These are the types of questions I started asking myself a while back while I was working at a big EAI/Business Process management company and the answers I came away with were disturbing enough for me to leave and adopt a completely different view on the future of network computing.
Anne, I have to apologize for how way off my comment was above. I’m more than a little embarassed to admit that I got this piece mixed up with another Anne’s work - an enterprise capital-W Web Services Anne that I had read just the day before and all this stuff comes in my aggregator such that I can’t distinguish Anne’s based on their respective presentational elements.
I suppose I’m a hopeless Anne sterotyping biggot.
Anyway, I feel like I was preaching catholicism to the pope up there :/ My apologies for being so dim.
Ryan, no worries. I was a little confused by your comment, wondering when I had addressed Web 2.0 vs. WS-*, and figuring that’s how you read my thinkings on SOA. But I was still glad to hear from you, no matter what the genesis of the comment, especially because your story and outlook intrigues me.
I’m used to having to distinguish myself from other Annes… in high school when I played lacrosse I was known by my first name and last name slurred together as one word (”Annetruitt”) because there were so many other Annes on the team. Seems fairly common for my generation. I’m even getting confused by all the Annes I’ve seen blogging.
Thanks for the nice compliment. I think I get Web 2.0 pretty well–maybe too well, some people might say. Please pass the Kool-aid…