The advantage to permalinks is just that your URL’s will look nicer. Other than that, no advantage.
To turn them on, login to your admin panel, and then go to Options>Permalinks. Enter a structure into the little box (the one suggested is good) and then click the ‘Update Permalinks’ button. Some text will appear in a text box and then you need to copy that into a file called .htaccess
. That is, the file has no name, but it’s file extension is .htaccess
. Then upload that to your blog directory. I suggest you make it writeable by the server (CHMOD 777) so that if you make any structure changes, they will be automatically reflected without you having to do anything.