Some Changes

I made some changes to the archives page, which now has a “live” archives feature to let you see all the posts from a certain month or years. It’s quite nice, and I took the opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile now, as well.

I changed all my permalinks from spaceninja.com/blog/archives/2005/10/25/post-name/ to spaceninja.com/blog/post-name/. This results in URLs that are cleaner and shorter, so if you ever have to type one by hand for some reason, it’s easier to remember, and doesn’t include the date, which is pretty much useless information in a URL. It’s only there to make things easier for blog systems that use static pages, but WordPress is entirely dynamic, so I might as well go for it.

This required two changes. One, I’m having to make sure that none of my posts have the same title. Actually, wordpress automatically creates the “post slug” from the title of the post, and then uses the post slug in the URL instead of the title. This means if I have two posts named “links”, the second one will actually be links-2 in the URL. This is acceptable, and all happens behind the scenes - except on posts that already exist. So I’m having to do a manual hunt for duplicate entries and fix their post slugs by hand. It shouldn’t take long, but there’s a chance some pages are inaccessable right now.

Secondly, I’m going to have to go through the archives and change any existing links to posts that use the older permalink style. This is going to be time consuming, but it’s got to be done, and when it is, I’ll feel better about the state of my archives. This means that for the next few weeks, you may see some broken links here and there. Don’t fret, I’m working on it.

• Fix duplicate post titles
• Fix links in posts - 1999
• Fix links in posts - 2000
• Fix links in posts - 2001
• Fix links in posts - 2002
• Fix links in posts - 2003
• Fix links in posts - 2004
• Fix links in posts - 2005