When I started this post, on March 19, 2007, many of the links on my blog were screwed up because I was blundering around trying to fix what I perceive as a problem with the way WordPress handles Permalinks—by default they use the “?p” method of labeling by post number instead of the more sensible “?m” method of labeling by dates. The bad thing about using post numbers instead of dates is that if a link stops working you can figure out what a date-containing link actually refers to.

But WordPress does have a “pretty permalink” option where you can use a nice format for the permalinks with year, month, day and post name. For instance, now that I’ve got this working (I am re-editing this post on March 21), this post has the pretty permalink https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2007/03/19/permalink-problem.

At first whenever I tried this, my site would go down. Finally I figured out that I needed to tell the genial and intrepid director of www.monkeybrains.net to put the Apache mod_rewrite service on my blog server. Those “pretty” directories don’t actually exist; mod_rewrite munges them into actual data-base code to pull the right posts out of the blog archive. Lightbulb?

Yawn, snore, hm? Is he still talking about code?

The whole issue came up because someone wrote me about a bad link into my site from the Wikipedia entry on Transrealism. For the record here’s the correct pretty link to Rudy writing about transrealism at an airport. Does anyone have the energy to fix that on Wikipedia? I don’t feel like wrestling with that, too.

On another front,

Rudy Rucker video about computation, from San Francisco. Filmed talking to R. U. Sirius. Thanks to Jeff Diehl for putting this together for the Ten Zen Monkeys site.

Bruce Sterling video about architecture from Belgrade. This is a very well made piece, with two camerapersons and an editor. Nice white out fades, and a good soundtrack. Bruce is having fun. Would be nice to see his face on, like the little video screens on gas pumps and in elevators. Like the ubiquitous dictator of Half-Life Two, but in a good way.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.