Plinky

Then I saw Jolie O’Dell’s Tweet:

And then I got my first Plinky prompt today. Welcome back!

I am pretty sure this covers everything from the old Blogger-published site.

# root index page
Redirect permanent /index.shtml /wp/index.php

# Blogger's year-month archive pages
RedirectMatch permanent /([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_[0-9]+_archive\.shtml /wp/$1/$2

# Blogger's 'label' (tag) pages; labels were not changed to tags
# in migration, so redirect to a WP search for that word
RedirectMatch permanent /labels/(.*)\.shtml /wp/index.php?s=$1

# this works on all post pages except where Blogger 'helpfully' omitted words
RedirectMatch permanent /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)\.shtml /wp/$1/$2/$3

For those posts where the post-pages published by Blogger omitted words from the title in the filename, the last redirect would result in a 404 (Blogger would tend to omit “a”, “an”, “the” and other small words from titles when creating post-pages). So I’ve installed the Smart 404 plugin (and hacked the code a bit, of course) to auto-suggest a matching post and/or search for keywords.

Suggestions and comments welcome!

I am (finally) working on redirecting everything from the old blog to the new, beautiful, WordPress blog. That involves a lot of fiddling with .htaccess Redirect rules and I’m a little worried that some regular expressions may creep in there. So far, all the monthly archive pages are redirected, so http://www.project-insomnia.com/2003_07_01_archive.shtml (which represents the Blogger-published archive of the first month’s worth of posts from the blog) will automatically redirect to http://www.project-insomnia.com/wp/2003/07. The tricky bit is going to be redirecting the post-pages, that is, the pages for each individual post, and I’m afraid that is where I’m going to need some regexp magic.

Progress is being made, slowly, ever slowly, but progress nonetheless.

(If you visited the new blog after the switchover and now note that things have changed again, yes, I changed templates to one that actually works. Learning curve.)