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What are "permalinks" and how do they differ from regular links? are they guaranteed to link to the same thing or something?

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I'm finding it really difficult to resist the temptation to post a lmgtfy link... – Manos Dilaverakis Dec 21 '09 at 12:22
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It's like permafrost, but different. :-) – Brian Knoblauch Dec 21 '09 at 13:28
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See Permalink on wikipedia.

A permalink, or permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely

"indefinitely" is a bit of a stretch, but it gives the right idea. As an example, http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ is a link to the SO blog, and "Free Vote-Based Advertising for Open Source Projects" is the top article. If you were to just provide a link to the top blog page in a discussion about vote-based advertising, after a few posts on the blog, your link would be nonsense. However if you link to the actual article (as I did above) it's a mostly-permanent reference.

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