Finishing Touches: Permalinks

From the start I wasn’t quite comfortable with just using the date/time at the foot of each entry as its permanent link (from the weblog home page), and Mike D.’s comment got me thinking about improvements.

Weblogs use a variety of permalink types:

‘#’ (e.g. Scripting News)
‘Permalink’ (e.g. Mike Davidson, WebWord)
Other descriptive text (e.g. Accessify’s link to this post, clagnut’s add/view/link)
Date/time (e.g. Simon Willison’s Weblog, A Whole Lotta Nothing)
Title of the entry (e.g. OK/Cancel)

Some opt for a combination of methods (e.g. SimpleBits, kottke.org), and I’ve now ended up combining 3, 4, and 5. The date/time is still linked, but so is the title text (albeit not visibly so) and a background image within the clickable area acts as an obvious indicator. It’s hopefully a bit more usable than it was.