Permalinks - What are They and How to Change Them on Blogger.com?

Blogs unlike normal websites have a constantly changing home page. The home page of a blog consists of the last blog post plus other recent entries. The default setting for blogger.com is the last 7 entries.

What this means is that if someone reading your blog finds a post on the home page to be of interest and bookmarks it, he is not book marking that post but the page itself.

The page is changing as you add new posts, and so a week later if he returns the post is no longer there as it has effectively scrolled off the page.

 So How Does he Bookmark the Post?

Most blogging platforms have an archiving facility and the ability to create individual pages for each post. In blogger.com this is in the archive settings where you can turn on POSTS.

Each individual post is then also stored as an html file with the file name being derived from the bog title. These posts can then be linked to. Again blogger.com makes it easy by creating a permalink. This permalink by default is the date as shown in the screen shot below

I don't find the date link particularly useful and it took me some time to notice it. I have changed it in my Blogs to a more obvious Permalink tag as shown in the screenshot below.

If you want to do this yourself you need to modify the template. Here is the relevant part of the template that uses the date as the permalink. You need to locate the paragraph for the post footer.

The highlighted part of the code is changed. Here is the modified version.