The title is absolute link bait, and a reference to a call I made on Twitter last night:
https://twitter.com/EricMann/status/456597510912360448
Link Bait
I absolutely hate sites like BuzzFeed. UpWorthy is growing ever closer to being on my personal do-not-click list as well. Just about all of their articles are some sort of top-10, top-20, or top-43 list that has absolutely zero impact on my life.
The “what happens next” articles are even worse offenders. They have all the makings of a stories with unexpected twists, but are merely devious attempts to trick readers into clicking through thanks to a half-hearted cliffhanger.
On the one hand, it’s admirable to find new and inventive ways to draw readers.
On the other hand, if you need to resort to tricking readers into reading your articles, then I’d argue your content isn’t of a high enough quality to deserve to be read.[ref]I recognize the irony of my using a similar title for this post. I’m trying to make a point – if you clicked through from Twitter, thank you. You might be interested in some of my other articles on WordPress as well. If you feel tricked into reading this article, I invite you to stay anyway and promise to never resort to such devious SEO-gaming techniques again.[/ref]
OK, so what happened?
Now that I’ve duped you into reading an article,[ref]I feel really dirty doing this. It won’t happen again. Ever. Promise.[/ref] let me actually answer the cliffhanging question.
Last year, I opened a WordPress ticket proposing we deprecate the [cci]get_permalink()[/cci] template tag in favor of [cci]get_the_permalink()[/cci] for consistency among our template tags. My ticket was a bit selfish, as I’ve personally used [cci]get_the_[/cci] functions that don’t exist more times than I can count.
Introducing [cci]get_the_permalink()[/cci] would cut down significantly on the number of typos I introduce to my own code. After talking to several other developers at WordCamps and meetups, it turns out I’m not the only one who makes this mistake.
There was an ongoing debate on the ticket, and eventually my patch was accepted – last month – and released as part of WordPress 3.9.
Was this unexpected? Yes and no. I never expected this particular patch to land in core, but I did expect the ongoing discussion on the idea. The WordPress community is an incredibly social and helpful one, so I never doubted we’d come together and actually discuss any proposed idea.
Even an idea not explicitly requested by members of the core team.
Do you have an unrequested patch lying around somewhere? Put it on Trac; you might be surprised by the response!
