I noted that if you revise some of your categories, it’ll mess everything up once again. I may do a little reshuffling at some point, which is why I left it out of my permalink structure.

I checked out your link. I can see how there might be a problem only using the postname, but the WordPress article cites wordpress 1.2 which is pretty old by now.

I haven’t experienced any problems since the change. Quite a few people use the ‘postname’ only structure these days, so I’d say it’s a pretty trustworthy convention.

However, if you’re just starting, be careful about using /%category%/%postname%/. Using %category% isn’t sensible, unless you are very sure that your categories won’t change. I fell into this trap – as my blog matures, I need to tweak the categories, which would break my permalinks.

Also, apparantly there is some bug with using just %postname%, but I don’t use it so I haven’t come across it. Pity, as I wanted to use it! Have you had any problems? Would be very interested to know.

I wrote this because I was really afraid that someone might break the internet

And then what would we do?! haha

I appreciate your point. A lot of news-style pieces are dated as far as the info they contain. And even this post might one day be superceded by a better, more up-to-date option. I just don’t think the date needs to be part of the link. And you can always put the posting date below the headline like I have currently.

HMG,

You can still go get the plugin and install it. Better late than never!

Rob,

Thank Maki at Dosh Dosh! He suggested Daily Blog Tips for my Ultimate Blogging Resource Search Bar. When I went to check out the site, I saw a post about timestamps which reminded me that I’d been meaning to do this for a while too

My blog is still new so I’m hoping it won’t cause much pain with the issues that you described above with the search engines (fingers crossed). That said, I’ve bookmarked this post in case I ever want to change them again in the future!

Each to their own and timeless posts seem to becoming very popular. I’m all for keeping with the dates please bloggers

I’d leave the date in the URL for a news site. Even though most people write some news pieces, it’s usually not the main focus of most blogs. So it depends on the content and what your ultimate goals are.