As some of you may have noticed, I recently rolled out two small changes to the website.
Citations and footnotes have been improved. This has been made possible through Michel Fortin’s quite excellent PHP Markdown Extra plugin, with a slight modification to change his <sup> tags into <cite> ones. I really am quite the pedant. They should also render more correctly in RSS readers, in theory, and they improve my writing experience because Fortin’s plugin automatically creates backlinks.
The second improvement concerns permalinks. For the longest time, any link log item used the permalink from the day with the post ID hashed onto the end, in the form http://pxlnv.com/2012/04/24/#post-3667. This isn’t bad—it’s certainly usable—but it wasn’t up to my satisfaction. This is changing effective immediately when I begin using the Daring Fireball Linked List WordPress plugin, instead of Page Links To. This has allowed me to create proper permalinks to link log items.
Neither of these changes are retroactive, as correcting the thousand-or-so links I’ve posted in the past year would be a tedious task, to say the very least. However, going forward, all permalinks and citations will be much improved.
If you’d like to find out more about the madness of creating a link log or linked list in WordPress, I’ve written a brief “how-to” guide.