Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>

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…

This June, I was one of the lucky ones who’d won the lottery, and was able to attend WWDC in San Francisco. While I was at the conference, it was awesome to have the whole schedule at my fingertips via the WWDC app on my iPhone. With CocoaConf Seattle just around the corner, I found myself wishing there were a CocoaConf app. No such luck.

Then I remembered iCal feeds are a thing, so went to check on the CocoaConf website for a subscribable calendar feed for the Seattle event, but that also didn’t seem to exist.

So as a public service to my fellow nerds who are attending CocoaConf 2014 in Seattle, I created a public iCal feed using Google Calendar, that you can subscribe to for the schedule of all the sessions, including the Thursday workshops. It should work on iOS devices, Google Calendar, Calendar.app on the Mac, BusyCal, and others. Here’s the link:

https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/f7oecob86640vd63qtmu57r92c%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

If you’re looking at this post on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac you should be able to just click the link to subscribe to the calendar.

Hope to see you at the conference!

If you see this, you’re looking at all of my old site’s content running on my self-hosted WordPress server… Phew!

I think that’s enough for tonight, but there will be more soon. I’ve got a bunch of details I want to write up about this project. Plus now that I have the tools I wrote to migrate from Manila to WordPress, I’ve got a bunch of other old content I want to migrate.

I suppose I should first figure out some redirects though, at least so my RSS subscribers don’t all break.

Stay tuned… 😉

Ps. All of the <guid>’s in my feed are now changed to a new format. I apologize that your RSS aggregator is probably about to freak out now. Fixing this was sadly not worth the effort at this point. 🙁

Pps. I realize it’s now 4:30 am, but I couldn’t let my links rot. I modified my WordPress permalink format to make legacy incoming links continue to work. I still need to do some testing, but for the moment things are much better than having basically every incoming permalink go 404.