Month: <span>October 2014</span>

Published October 18, 2014 by

My EditThisPage.com site is now here

Hi all—here’s an update following my previous post asking for some WordPress advice: I pulled the trigger, and now all of the content from Jake.EditThisPage.com is ported over to JakeSavin.com. Amazingly it worked right the first time! When does that ever happen?

Most, if not all of the links into the old site now redirect to the right place here. For the moment they’re temporary redirects, but after a bit more testing I’ll make them permanent so they’ll get picked up by search engines and the like. And contrary to my initial fears, the problem with pages living at multiple URLs was able to be easily resolved by redirecting via mod_rewrite rules in my .htaccess file.

404: Just say no!

The content of that site spans the period from December 22, 1999 to March 11, 2003, and all of the posts from that site are in their own category to make them easy to find.

Next I’m going to write some code to export my Radio UserLand site to WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) format, so I can merge that content in too. I know a lot more now than I did when I started this work with Manila, so it should be quite a bit easier. After that, a one-off exporter for my custom WebsiteFramework site, Jspace.org. That one goes way back to 1997!

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Published October 16, 2014 by

I Need Some WordPress Advice

I have a plan for something I want to do with my site, and could use some advice from experienced WordPress people.

I have two legacy sites that I want to merge into my current WordPress site. Content in this site already consists of the imported content from one of these sites, plus posts I’ve made since switching over.

The other site I want to merge in has conflicting post IDs. In order to redirect old URLs to their new homes in WordPress, I need a way to resolve this conflict in a predictable fashion that can be addressed with mod_rewrite (or something comparably simple).

So I decided to apply an offset of 10,000 as I export the content from that site, so:

  • ID 15 becomes ID 10015.
  • ID 1243 becomes ID 11243.

This guarantees that there will be no conflict with any IDs in the current site.

And since the old IDs can be transformed relatively easily with regex into the new ones, I can create some mod_rewrite rules that are conditional on requests coming to the old host name, which redirect from the old URLs to the new ones. (I’ve already tested this, and it appears to work.)

So basically what I want to know is this:

Is there some reason I should not do this?

Am I painting myself into a corner?

Will the jump from ID ~2000 to ID 10001 cause any issues?

Any gotchas (SEO or otherwise) with my next post after the import starting at roughly ID 12000?

Any comments in favor or against are much appreciated! 🙂

Update: @octothorpe replies on Twitter, “@jsavin That should work, although having a lot of mod_rewrite can add serious latency. Also make the redirects 301s.” — I’m doin’ this thang…

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Published October 16, 2014 by

Dave Winer: Someone had to go first

Dave Winer:

As Walter Isaacson points out  innovators need to be both humanitarians and scientists, we have to touch the human spirit, and be masters of the scientific method. In the bootstrap of blogging it was enormously important that I was both a writer and a programmer. We had to learn to write for this new medium, and we had to figure out how the software worked.

I was lucky in 1994 that I was completely free to explore, and that the world was ready to make this leap. So I began a trip, that led to something wonderful , every bit as big as I thought it might be back then.

Read the whole thing.

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