March 16, 2003

restructuring default archives

If you are new to blogging then "starting a blog - with movabletype":http://nslog.com/archives/2003/03/13/starting_a_blog_with_movabletype.php may be a worthwhile read. I looks like he "ran into the same problem I did":http://nslog.com/archives/2003/02/22/grrrr_site_organization.php. As a side note I decided to do this on "andersja's adivce":http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/06/my_movable_type_installation.html. I did decide that the depth (to the day) was overkill for my site and decided to just use /archives/year/month/title.php as my archive location. After scanning through my access_log I noticed that there are still a sizable number of requests for some of the pages that were in the default location (i.e. /archives/000057.html). So I decided to see if I could fix this problem! My solution is to let movabletype create an .htaccess (I am hosted on apache - I don't know how to do this for IIS) file in the /archives/ directory that uses "mod_rewrite":http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/ to redirect folks to the new permalink (note: after building it once you can disable rebuilding automatically because new entries will not have been at the old location). To do this I created a new index template with the output specified as archives/.htaccess (you should make sure you don't already have a hand created .htaccess file in this location first). Here is the "source of the index template":/log/projects/movabletype/dot_htaccess_archive_template.txt : == RewriteEngine On
<MTEntries sort_order="ascend" last_n="300000">
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} <$MTEntryID pad="6"$>.html$
RewriteRule .* <$MTEntryLink$> [R,L]
</MTEntries>
 == The "final .htaccess file":/log/projects/movabletype/dot_htaccess.txt looks like this : == RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} 000001.html$
RewriteRule .* http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2002/08/new_site.html [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} 000002.html$
RewriteRule .* http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2002/08/old_content.html [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} 000003.html$
RewriteRule .* http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2002/08/john_earles_last_day.html [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} 000004.html$
RewriteRule .* http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2002/08/preparing_for_class.html [R,L]
...
 == Each RewriteCond line matches a given old permalink location and each RewriteRule line redirects incoming requests to the current permalink location. Give it a try to "see how it works":/archives/000057.html. Similar rules could be added to handle category archives etc. This is just the sort of refactoring task that could potentially be handled automagically by blogging software. updated: /archives/.htaccess has been merged with /.htaccess so that canonicalization rules will work properly. Also, I have the redirect rules returing the appropriate HTTP code. And the sample files have been updated.
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Comments

  1. posted by: Andrew on May 29, 2003 11:00 PM

    Thank you very, very much for this tip....without it I wouldn't have been able to redo my weblogs into a cleaner URL structure.

  2. posted by: Raquel on March 30, 2004 12:05 PM

    Found this link while searching Google, thanks

  3. posted by: mariano on May 6, 2004 6:49 PM

    many thanks nathan.. after a few tweaks.. i could get mi blog online.. again :)

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