I obviously have too much time on my hands (or, more likely,
I am vigorously procrastinating from finishing up my grading for the Spring
quarter), but…
I subscribe to a daily blog post by my friend Nick Burbules. Nick (who is an educational theorist in his day job) has been writing this blog for many years (since 2004!!).
The Blog, called Progressive Blog Digest, or PBD, is a summary, or "digest," of progressive blogs (and other news sources), tracking what's currently interesting to the progressive blogosphere.
Before it was a Blog, PBD was a daily email message, called "Today's News." A vestige of those humble origins exists in Google Group, called "Today's News," that allows anyone to get the daily edition of PBD delivered via email. The archives of "Today's News" shows 3442 "topics," which translates into approximately 3442 daily editions. That's a lot of writing!
In any case, I've been reading Nick's daily posts since the beginning, or nearly so. I like to get it via email, and usually read it while drinking my morning tea as my primary way of keeping up on what's going on in the political world. (Yes, yes, I know, it's not exactly objective news, but still it keeps me up to date on big political events.)
Anyway, I heartily recommend PBD to anyone who is interested in progressive politics. You can subscribe to the daily email here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/todays-news or read the blog on the Web at http://pbd.blogspot.com.
When I read PBD/Today's News on my phone (which is typical…I use
CloudMagic these days for my consolidated emails), this is what I see at the end of every Today's News post:
This morning, a particular sentence in this boilerplate footer jumped out at me:
If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL: http://pbd.blogspot.com
I’ve looked at this sentence a thousand times and never
wondered until this morning.
However, this morning, I wondered: "What’s an 'envelope link'?
(There are a
number of links there: none obviously looks like an envelope link.)
So, naturally, I googled “envelope link.” Nothing relevant. (Try it!)
If I am using Gmail via its web interface,
it’s a little easier to figure out what "link" is referred to, because there is only one link “below.”
Gmail is smart enough to normally “trim” out the Google Group
boilerplate, but you can see it if you click the little gray ellipses at
the bottom of the message, as I've done here:
But still, what’s the “envelope link”?
When I teach my students how to post their blogs to D2L (Desire2Learn, our learning management system, which I think might be changing its name to "Brightspace"), I
teach them the difference between the overall blog URL and the “permalink.” (http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/what-is-a-permalink/)
The link at the bottom of a blog post (linked to the title of the blog, or sometimes to the date that it was originally posted) is the
permalink.
“Permalink”
isn’t a very pretty word (I like “envelope link” better), but maybe there is a
better phrase?
I looked up “What’s another word for permalink,” but Word
Hippo said “No words found.” (http://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/permalink.html)
So…I guess we’re stuck with “envelope link” (which as near
as I can tell Nick made up) or “permalink.”
By the way, while writing this blog post, I learned two new words:
And
See what I get for procrastinating?
P.S. As I was about to hit “send” on an email to Nick about this, I realized
something. “Envelope link”….”envelope...”….AHA!
My visual memory kicked in. When you read a blog on blogspot.com, like this one, at the bottom of every post, you see:
Notice the little icon of an envelope? When you point to it with your mouse, it says:
THAT makes sense.
(However, it only makes sense when reading the blog on the blog…as
opposed to reading it as an email.)
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