I’m still fine tuning my brand new shiny blog and one thing I decided to try and do was use permalinks. For those of you that my not be familiar with the term I was just going to describe it here but I realized that a much better description is available from wikipedia. So here is an excerpt.

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, its use avoids link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems, including Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, RapidWeaver, Pivot and Blogger, support such links. Other types of websites use permalinks, too, but the term itself is most common within the blogosphere. Permalink is a portmanteau word made from permanent link and is often simply stated so as to be human-readable.

Now I new I was going to have a problem here as I always have the same problem with php based applications. The problem is that the permalinks use something called mod-rewrite which basically allows a page url to be more readable and accessible to search engines by rewriting it to something else.

The big problem? Mod-rewrite does not exist on Windows Servers that are running Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server). So as you can see I’m kind of stuck at the first post here. However after a little research I noticed several options to reproduce the same effect. Two of the solutions involved using a custom dll with IIS and the other involved using a custom 404 error page.

Three hours later and I found that none of these solutions would work for me. However if your interested in trying them on your blog I think its’ worth giving them a look as it does appear that they work for many others. Here are a couple of links to the various solutions:

http://www.keyboardface.com/IIS-Permalinks/ – 404 page solution

DLL Solutions:

WordPress URL Rewrite Plugin for blogs running on IIS (http://www.binaryfortress.com/wordpress-url-rewrite/) by Binary Fortress Software
URL Rewriting for WordPress under IIS (http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/url-rewriting-for-wordpress-under-iis/) by Dean Lee

Finally I managed to get it working using a solution called isapi_rewrite (http://www.isapirewrite.com/). This is a program that basically emulates the mod-rewrite program on apache servers. The scripting of the rewrite rules is slightly different so it’s not a totally straightforward affair. However there is a great article on implanting it here, as well as some other great tips for using wordpress with IIS: http://backtalk.com/articles/hacking-wordpress-with-microsofts-iis-web-server/

So finally I’ve got there, my blog now uses permalinks and so far as I can see they all work correctly. However if you do see any broken / links or pages it would be great if you could let me know.