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The Crucible and new URLs
Oh things have been slightly screwy since I switched from Berkeley DB to MySQL. Some of the comments in older posts are not showing up and they can't be commented on but all the old comments are still in the system. So what I am going to do is export all my entries and delete my entire MT install and reinstall fresh and then rebuild the site.
I think there might be some old corrupted settings and from the old DB not to mention the old DB files are still sitting on my server so this looks like a good time to burn the whole thing down and start again. I want to have it done by the start on next month for stat tracking. But it may be down for a day if I can't get it all done but I probably can.
But when I do this it is going to shift all the URLs of the archives around. You see currently each archive uses the ID creation number as it's URL. This is not a very good way of doing things because they can be shifted around and the are not exactly always in sequence. So I am going to be changing them to a naming scheme based on the title of the post.
For example
http://www.8bitjoystick.com/archives/000712.php
Will become.
http://www.8bitjoystick.com/archives/jake_review_pelican_ps2_arcade_joystick.php
All the old bookmarks to direct posts will be off after I do this and it will take a while for Google and other search engines to catch on but this will be good in the long run.
Update: How is this for a new 404 Error File not found page?
Jake at April 28, 2003 
WebDev
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Comments
Looks like this would be a good time to finally decide on a new engine and shift my Greymatter content onto it, editing URLs along the way.
Posted by: l33t k1w1 at April 28, 2003 12:00 PM
wont this actually give you more hits from google? Because there are more words in the text string? Of course it will also give you more erroneous hits as well but that isnt so bad.
Posted by: pete at April 28, 2003 12:01 PM
it might in the long run but for the first month or so all the search engine hits going to this site for older stuff would be wrong so I will have to have a very polite 404 file not found error page.
Posted by: Jake at April 28, 2003 12:21 PM
eh...i feel for you...that is not a task i would wish on anyone...:-\
Posted by: Lilly at April 28, 2003 2:25 PM
Nah I shouldn't be to hard at all. The hardest part is that I have thirty two template files that I want to make sure they are backed up before I wipe my cgi-bin. I have my site backed up on CD so I don't loose too much sleep over it. This way all the images are still on the server and I don't have to move them. I'll just put on some DJ Shadow tracks and away we go.
Posted by: Jake at April 28, 2003 2:45 PM
Have you considered offering suggestions to the newer files in the 404 page?
You are going to have some pretty angry google-surfers (and of course other search engine users for the sake of argument) who won't be patient enough to go through another search. If you told them something like "it was here, now its there", it would help a ton.
The alternative would be to deal with confused surfers for the next month or two...
Posted by: Stephen at April 28, 2003 4:37 PM
I think it looks pretty dam good. hmmmmm. cats looks a little tired though. perhaps he needs some lion coffee?
Posted by: pete at April 28, 2003 5:26 PM
374cbcb5a8f09a9333a641b8f04b7f4d 4123a.
Posted by: 98097b08c309f7c21fa7bb at March 16, 2005 10:15 AM
