Finally I’ve got these damn permalinks working. If you don’t know what they are, permalinks are basically the static URL links for the pages and posts that I add to this site. Unfortunately, they are pretty ugly because they leave ‘?’ marks, ‘=’ signs and numbers in the address. And from what I hear, ugly links are what search engines stay away from because they are typically associated with automatically generated pages. So after several hours of researching and tweaking, I’ve cleaned up my page to show clean pages. I’m sure that while you’re reading this, the URL above probably reads /blog/2007/working-permalinks/ which is a lot cleaner than some symbols and numbers. Plus it’s pretty informative before even looking at the content.

Although I’m sure someone’s going to stumble upon this place looking for help, I don’t do well writing long, informative tutorials detailing how I managed to get clean permalinks working here. But I guess I should do a little bit of it. Since I’m running this on Wordpress, I first read up on their documentation, which was very confusing and didn’t really help. Then I searched their support section, and read what others had to say about it. In conclusion, I went with the most common solution. I was doubtful that it would work, but it did. After doing some cleanup work, it’s all good now.

I was afraid that the real links would be all fucked up and all the pages cached in on Google and so forth would be broken. Luckily, the old links still work. These new permalinks are just for show. In reality, people coming here fail to realize that this is just a simple redirection trick generated by Wordpress. Very sneaky.