as days pass by

There should be some way of identifying from a blog post what its permalink is. This comes up in referrer log analysis; most links from a weblog are not from the archived version of the post, but from the front page of the weblog, and there’s no way that an automatic process can deduce from that where to link back to (since if you just link to the front page, the post will disappear from there in pretty short order). Something like RSS auto-discovery, but for individual posts. I can’t think of a good way of doing this, without suggesting something like all permalink links having a class of “permalink”. Moreover, an automatic process would have difficulty in the following situation: \<div class=”post”> blah blah blah post 1 blah blah \<a href=”somewhereelse” title=”Link to someone else’s weblog”> blah blah blah \</div> \<a href=”archives/post1” title=”Permalink for post 1” class=”permalink”> \<div class=”post”> blah blah blah post 2 blah blah \<a href=”somewhere” title=”Link to a second person’s weblog”> blah blah blah \</div> \<a href=”archives/post2” title=”Permalink for post 2” class=”permalink”> If you’re an automated process watching referers for the second person’s weblog, and someone follows the link in the code above, you could grab the source of that page, but there’s no way (as far as I can see), even after you search the source of the page and find the link to your own blog, to know whether the permalink associated with it is the one above it or the one below. Suggestions welcomed. This is why I haven’t implemented linkbacks yet… ——-