Site news: Permalink URLs changed

Written by Adrian Holovaty on August 26, 2002

I've changed the URL scheme for permalinks on this site. For example,

/blog/02/08/23/2328

...is now...

/blog/archive/2002/08/23/2328

I did this to make the URLs more readable and hackable. "2002" is more easily grasped than "02".

In the interest of avoiding a Knight Ridder-ish fiasco, I've played it safe: Every old link will still work.

Also, there's a new archive page that lists every entry in reverse-chronological order.

And, finally, the home page now only lists the 5 latest blog entries (not 10), in order to save you some load time. Older entries are accessible via the new archive page and the search engine.

Comments

Posted by Rob on August 28, 2002, at 9:42 p.m.:

How are you doing this? I know there was an trick with Apache that Amazon used to use to turn query strings into human-readable URLs ...

Posted by Adrian on August 29, 2002, at 1:13 a.m.:

Apache's mod_rewrite makes it really easy. It's tricky to learn but very powerful. Also see How to Succeed With URLs on ALA.

Posted by Rob on August 29, 2002, at 4:14 a.m.:

OK, I had fiddled around with mod_rewrite a bit before, but it didn't seem to work. Turns out (courtesy of the brilliant idea to check my error_log) my host doesn't have the module included, so I've sent an email off to the sysadmin asking him if it's possible to enable it. Thanks for the help, though -- the ALA link is excellent.

Posted by Adrian on August 29, 2002, at 3:16 p.m.:

Forgot to mention there was an evolt article on this topic a few months back. The technique it presents doesn't require mod_rewrite, so that might help you in case your ISP shoots down your request.

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