Super Permalinks
Someone asked me if my site will have permalinks (yes - I'm not changing any links) and it reminded me of a technique which I read about quite some time ago by Thomas Phelps and Robert Wilensky:
Traditional hyperlinks are very brittle, in that they are useless if the page later moves to a different URL. This project improves upon traditional hyperlinks by creating a signature of the target page, selecting a set of very rare words that uniquely identify the page, and relying on a search engine query for those rare words to find the page in the future. For example, the Google programming contest can be found using this link. (source)
The idea is that instead of remembering the location of something, you remember a little bit of the content there, since that is what you acually care about. Then when the location changes, the content stays the same, so you can still find it. I thought it was a cool idea at the time, so whenever I was at a website, I would try to remember a few unusual words that it contained so if I ever wanted to get back there, I could just google for those words. It worked, but I've stopped doing it for no real reason.
So, if you want to try it. Then just remember a few of the following words: indistinguishable, subcontracting, metaphysical, cliffhanger, melodic, phonetic, shortchanged, nocturnal, sugar. At the moment a search for all of these words comes up with 48 hits but hopefully that will change in the future. At the moment google doesn't even know this page exists, so it will be a while before this is useful. I've produced a visual aid for you to remember them by - simple (though I couldn't work out how to make the sugar metaphysical, and drawing a contract above a bag of sugar is supposed to suggest "sub" contracting which is a bit loose).
As a closing note, I tried to look at the actual paper, and I got a server error. I don't think that is irony, since the link to it was just a normal link. But I still found it amusing.
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