Updated permalink structure
I’m very glad that I am not more prolific! I just changed from a date-driven permalink structure for this blog to a “slug” based one. That means that instead of addresses based on dates like this: http://willmurray.name/blog/2005/07/12/29/ (the first post in this blog), now you will see addresses based on the topic of the message like this: http://willmurray.name/blog/msg/maintaining_your_pc/
Even though there are some WordPress plugins that help keep track of updated permalinks, they rely upon slugs (that’s the message topic), and I didn’t use them in the past. So I had to write a rather complicated Apache .htaccess file to redirect all of the 88 older addresses to their shiny new addresses. If I didn’t do that, Google would lose track of everything, and any visitors following old links would end up with a 404 error message (file not found).
If your blog is hosted on an Apache server with mod_rewrite installed and you are interested in knowing more details about how I got this to work, please leave me a comment. If you’re running on a Windows or Mac server, I don’t think my method will work.
So why go to all this pain? I’m planning on making the upgrade to the new WordPress 2.5 within the next day or so, and I want to fix a few things that have been bugging me for a while. My old permalink structure was one of those things. I figure it’s best to work out old bugs before bringing in any new ones.
As you can guess, that means that there will probably be some hiccups in the blog as I continue to make changes to it over the next few days to weeks. If things look funky, check back in a few hours or contact me if it’s urgent (hopefully that page won’t be affected since it’s not part of the blog itself).
Thanks for your patience and understanding!
Tags: Apache, debugging, mod_rewrite, redirect, updates, upgrades, WordPress
