What's a PermaLink?

Inspired by my success earlier today at resolving the problem of my "Comments" link not incrementing the number when a comment was made in response to a specific post, I've now fixed another problem I'd been planning to fix when I could figure out how. It had to do with "PermaLinks," and you'll now see it below this post and the others on this page. What are they? And what can you do with them?

Well, PermaLinks are links to a specific entry in a weblog. As you'll no doubt realize, as soon as you add another entry at the top of a weblog, the other entries are shifted down, and eventually they drift off the page and into the archive. A PermaLink provides a way to jump to a specific entry, even after it has disappeared into the archives. You can copy the permalink to your clipboard by right clicking on the word "PermaLink" and choosing "Copy Shortcut." Then just paste that link wherever you want to refer to that particular post and shazzam!, you've linked to it.

Here's a discussion of how they evolved as well as some further links to discussions about them.
- posted by Perry @ 1:41 PM