Utterly Boring dot com

Cleaning House

Last night I went through and got rid of every remnant of the "utterlyboring.com/blog/archives/xxxxxx.php" addresses from this site's archives, replacing them with their current, more useful (though sometimes longer) URLs. I had a pile (nearly 1300) statements like this in my .htaccess file for this site:

Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/001275.php http://utterlyboring.com/archives/2003/12/22/thing_may_break_for_a_bit.php

I've long since quit using the "/blog" subdirectory here, because I realized that I'm never really going to put anything else here other than the blog, so there's no sense for subdirectories. (The original reason for the subdirectory was because this site was hosted under jakeortman.com, and I had my resume, portfolio, etc... on here, so subdirectories were needed.)

So I had those redirects in place since I did a massive rebuild nearly a year ago. Now I'm getting rid of those redirects now that there's no remnants of them anywhere on my site, and if there are old bookmarks to them at this point, oh flippin' well. The entries are old, and Google's long since picked up the proper URLs, and now that I've gotten my 404 page to work with dynamic publishing (thanks to this article), I just hope people are smart enough to use a search form.

I also got rid of my RSS 1.0 feed, and made an .htaccess redirect to the RSS 2.0 feed (whose location has changed as well to www.utterlyboring.com/index.rss). If this buggers up your feed readers, let me know, but I have setup .htaccess redirects for all the various addresses (FeedDemon got the redirect, and immediately started reading from the new address, changing its settings -- man, that's slick). I just didn't see the need for two RSS feeds and an Atom feed.

That gives me one less index template to rebuild upon posting, as well. So that makes it so that my RSS 2.0, Atom, Main Index, Main Archive, and Left Column Archive and Stats (up on the right column of this page) are the only index templates getting rebuilt on posting, and the individual entry's page is getting built for that entry as well. Otherwise, everything else is getting built dynamically and cached with MT 3.0's dynamic templates, making posting and rebuilds fly right along (much more so than before).

Long time readers of this site (and I'm talking REALLY long time readers) know that this site had a stage for a few months where there was no posting. While the archives here date back to Nov. 2002, I've been posting on this site for longer than that. The problem was that I had a problem with my server at my previous host combined with an early 2.x build of MovableType that I didn't know how to use. Being an idiot, I didn't back up, so I lost several months worth of posts, and I got too busy in my new job to do anything about it. I thought the entries were gone.

Then Barney and I were discussing the Web archive, and I thought to myself "Wait a minute, I betcha they have those old posts." and sure enough, they did. Granted, I posted for a couple weeks then, but it was several posts a day. So expect those to be copied/pasted as entries into this system as time allows.

So expect more random crap to show up on this site on a future date. It'll be dated, and some of the URLs won't work, but I've put quite a bit into this site over the years, and there's no sense on not having it all in one place.

Posted by Jake on 11/15/04 @ 07:07 AM
Posted in Site Info | Permalink



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