Spring cleaning

We're in the midst of doing some spring cleaning around the house and it seemed like a good idea to get my act together here as well...

First I fixed up all the feeds so they validate. I was serving up RDF as text/plain and that wasn't good. In addition, every single feed was missing the xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" namespace declaration.

Then I dove into getting the monthly and category archives worked out. I still don't have a master category index, but the rest is taken care of. Since no one seemed to be hitting the old ones, I didn't worry about doing redirection there. I did make one change to MT's Util.pm (bin/lib/MT/Util.pm) to change dirify to use dashes instead of underscores when substituting for spaces.

When changing over the monthly pages, I investigated using Mark Pilgrim's monthly calendar template (and still want to do that) but held off for now because I need to do a lot of customization. I also need to figure out how all the macros work and interact. For now, it's still a complete archive of the month and because some search engines had been hitting the monthly pages, I had to delve into redirects. I always get a little lost doing redirects (I think the recursive nature throws me), so these links helped a bit Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide, HTTP/1.1 Status Code Definitions and Apache module mod_rewrite.

# redirect the old monthly archives
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)\.html$ blog/archives/$1/$2/ [R=301,L]

While I was at it, I figured I'd set up daily archives. Whoops. Turns out that I was already creating them (I don't recall doing that). I couldn't conclusively decide whether any engines were linking there (they aren't directly linked anywhere, so it's doubtful) but a similar rule takes care of things:

# redirect the old daily archives
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)\.html$ blog/archives/$1/$2/$3/ [R=301,L]

It's a decent first pass but there is still work to be done. Now I need to turn my attention to the disaster in my physical office.

Still to do

Figure out how I want the individual entries setup and then determine how to redirect them all in an .htaccess file. I've seen some strategies for this before, just need to go find them. It might be easier to handle it via a special external mechanism (GCI based) just for these files rather than an enormous list. Something to think about.

I also need to finish the category stuff and figure out how I really want to use that area. If I pull in the 200+ entries from Ztuff v1, the current category pages will be even worse than they are now.

Posted by Dave at June 6, 2004 04:50 PM