Since Benjy has been playing around with the back-end templating system I wrote for Fury 3.1, I've started giving names to some of the terms and constructs I've used. One of the most important is the concept of 'pseudostatic pages'. Basically, every permalink (http://fury.com/article/*.php) and the topic pages (http://fury.com/topics/*.php) all appear to be static URLs. They don't have parameters tacked on to the end (article.php?id=784) and so search engines will actually index them, while they don't tend to index parameterize pages.

In reality, these article and topic pages don't exist. The actual page for displaying individual articles is a page called 'article' and the one for topics is called 'topics' (don't ask why one is singular and the other is plural. 'articles' actually exists as well. I should probably change it to be consistent). So when you ask for http://fury.com/article/890.php it actually calls http://fury.com/article with the parameter '/890.php' which the code strips down to 890 and displays the data accordingly.

I did this partly to be indexed by search engines better (read: indexed by search engines at all) and partly to have a cleaner system, where a layperson can take a look at a url and make a fair guess at what they'll see if they go to http://fury.com/topics/interface.php.

My original design accounted for making small unique 'keyphrases' for articles as well as topics, so that this post might be found at http://fury.com/article/pseudostatic.php and I'll probably implement that soon, but I'm loath to go back through a thousand previous posts and make up keyphrases for them, so I'll make sure that the old way will still work.

Anyhow, just wanted to share a bit about the underpinnings of Fury. Benjy's giving me good ideas on ways to make furynodes (another neologism, this time referring to the whole fury template engine) more accessible to the average user, and eventually I suspect I'll be releasing a version for people to use, in similar fashion to greymatter, to create their own blogs and sites. In actuality, it's more geared towards making templated web sites with hierarchical templated objects within objects, more than a weblogging system per-se, but we'll see where it goes before release.