August 29th, 2005

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Last Boring Site Note for a While

Thanks to everybody who responded with suggestions for my incredibly dull dilemma regarding redirects last week (especially Richard, who has patiently discussed this issue with me at least 47 times). Geordie from Metalogix ended up helping me out by generating the required 2300+ redirect pages I required. He’s a star, and this was right up his alley as Metalogix makes content migration solutions.

I debated with myself as to whether I should redirect from the basenames to the numbers or vice versa. Ultimately, I chose the former, because it’s the old, numbered pages which Google likes and knows about. Plus, apparently Google hates redirects, so who knows what would happen if I went the other way. Unfortunately, this essentially means my old entries become static pages which I have to update manually, but it’s the lesser of two evils.

On a related, equally unexciting note, I’m leaving comments open indefinitely for all new entries. I used to close them after a couple of weeks, to combat spam, but I’m hoping my faith in Movable Type 3.2’s spam defence will be rewarded. I’ve also enabled TypeKey authentication, should anybody be so inclined.

Comments: 2 Responses so far

Richard
August 29th, 2005
5:15 pm

“apparently Google hates redirects”

Not if they’re done right. The code I sent you sends a “permanently re-directed” code to Google, telling it that it should replace the URL it has in its database with the one your server redirects to.

Actually, that’s more theory and hand-waving, because I just did a five-minute search and found evidence for Google not handling 301 (the HTTP code) redirects properly, which if it doesn’t, breaks with web standards. Danny Sullivan has a comprehensive breakdown of how Yahoo! and Google handle redirects at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050801-130330

“this essentially means my old entries become static pages which I have to update manually”

Really? MT can have different templates for different types of URL schemes, which is why I sent you the code in the first place. :P …and I just looked at an old post, and you’re not re-directing, meaning the content is now in two “places”.

Also: I just tried to sign in to TypeKey from this article, and got this message: “The site you’re trying to comment on has not signed up for this feature. Please inform the site owner.”

[Reply]

James
August 30th, 2005
11:37 am

This is cool stuff and addresses a problem I’ve been trying to figure out for about a month, though only when I have not been doing other things, which means I’ve been thinking about doing it.

A short 5-minute tutorial at the next blogger meetup would be super duper.

[Reply]