One of the potential drawbacks to switching content management systems for my website was losing the permanent link to specific postings. I receive a fair amount of traffic due to some Google searches, and I have posted comments on a couple of sites that generate a few links per week. I didn’t want to lose this traffic simply because the link had changed names.
In my case there were three issues I needed to address:
If you search the Wordpress Codex you’ll find an article about importing Moveable Type entries to Wordpress, which contains a section on Preserving Permanent links. Using the template suggested in the article, I created a new Moveable Type template that output a line for each Moveable Type entry, like this:
<?php
require('wp-config.php');
header('Content-type: text/plain');
?>;
<MTEntries lastn="999999">
Redirect Permanent /archives/<$MTEntryID$>.html https://zanshin.net/blogs/<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/
<?php echo sanitize_title("<$MTEntryTitle$>"); ?>
</MTEntries>
Redirect Permanent /blogs/######.html https://zanshin.net/yyyy/mm/dd/ <?php echo sanitize_title("Title"); ?>What I needed was a pure .htaccess file to permanently redirect visitors to old URL to the new URL. In order to do that I needed to strip out the php references and manually sanitize the titles. You see the URL scheme I had chosen for Wordpress uses a sanitized version of the posting title in the URL. Quotes, dollar signs, exclamation points, parenthesises, et cetera, aren’t allowed in these sanitized titles.
Making a backup of the redirect.php file the template code above had produced, I set out to accomplish this by hand. (NB: I did try, through the help of a friend to use awk and regular expressions to automate the title sanitazation. While this was largely successful, I ultimately ended up using a file I had converted in TextMate using a series of find and replace commands.)
The resulting file had 1330 lines that looked like this (and, yes, had I been quicker thinking I could have come much closer to this format with the template described above):
Redirect 301 /blogs/######.html https://zanshin.net/yyyy/mm/dd/title/
Points of interest in this format:
Upon loading this file to the root of my site on the new server I promptly got an internal server error (500), meaning that the .htaccess file had a mistake (or two or three). I am not ashamed to admit that I used a brute-force method for finding the errors: I commented all 1330 lines out, and then in blocks of 100 lines each un-commented them and reloaded the site. When it again threw the internal server error between lines 600 and 700, I knew where the problem was located. Two lines had problems. One was missing a “-” for a space, and the other was missing the closing “/” at the end of the URL.
Hopefully now people coming to my site via old links, be they from a search engine, an embedded link on another site, or a bookmark, they will be redirected to the new location of the page.