Eureka!

I think I finally managed to ferret out the form for postID as a REAL permalink  that will continue to work no matter what happens to the post or where it may be moved.

upon further examination…

It appears that

http://<domain>?p=PostIdNum

will in fact work. I must have been typing something incorrectly in my experiments. It took me a bit of redundant mucking about to discover this fact. The default behaviour of an independent wordpress site is a bit different, and I admit that when compared to my dearest one I am notoriously poor at doing research; unless it is the real kind wherein one actually does ones own discovery and experiments–which is what, in fact, I resorted to in this as well.

One can even add

&preview=true

to the end and use the same link before it is posted (and which will do no harm once the entry is live) making it

http://<domain>?p=<PostIdNum>&preview=true

In addition, one can add a bookmark in the form

#comment-<CommentIdNum>

with the dash instead of the equal sign followed by the PostId number, or any other bookmark

#<BookMarkId>

which exists or is allowed in the post, making it

http://<domain>?p=PostIdNum&preview=true#comment-CommentIdNum

This will… may… save me some effort although it is not all that difficult to create the unique tags I have been using. it tends though to bog down the whole process though. I wish the links would stick around after the draft is saved.

I am now investigating links of the same kind to pages. although this is not so important… and I have just now discovered that indeed this very same form works for pages. And in the case of wordpress blogs integrated with domain names, the method works as well. One can use both ones registered domain and the original wordpress blog name. Both will work. Hmm. Well, give me good old fashioned scientific method any old day.

The fact is that once one clicks “save” (verses the auto-save that happens automatically in the beginning) one must then construct the link oneself (from, for example, by editing the “Get Shortlink” link, or by copying the “Preview” link before one makes the post live.)  Evidently once one changes or alter the status of the publishing date wherein it no longer reads “Publish immediately” this link will no longer be listed and will instead be replaced by the default “permalink” which contains a directory structure involving the date of publication.

This post, for example can be accessed by using the following:

Try them for yourself!  I have tested them both logged in and logged out and they seem to function properly on the handful of machines I have surrounding me.

The downside of all this is that there appears to be no way for a non blog member to discern the PostIdNum.  It can only be seen in the dashboard area before one saves for the first time.  After that it can be unmangled from the “edit” links, but only if one is able to access these, therefore if one wants people to use these links, they must be provided in some way.  Which means that I should probably create some templates for this.

The Big Merge…

…seemed to go off without a hitch.  My final step this evening has been to remove all the post from “reflections.”  I did have to modify a few elements.  Some menu items were duplicated, as were all three blogs made to look similar.  It appears that I could very well merge all three into one.  The same effect as before could well be accomplished with one blog and three distinct categories.  I believe I more fully understand the issue of “tags” vs. “categories” and would now have little trouble using both to accomplish this.
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