Inchoate

Converting Movable Type URLs

Back in Aug of 2004, I switched my blog to use descriptive URLs rather than the old-style, Movable Type 2 default of /archive/002981.html.

The downside to this is that after the site rebuild I had effectively created a whole 'nother blog, one all crosslinked in the new style, and one in the old style. And because the rest of my site has random links into the old style from before the change it continues to be crawled. To this day I still get search referrals pointing to the old site.

This isn't so bad except for two things. Comments go to the new site, not the new one. So referrals where someone's looking for rent scam help would, on the old site, miss out on all the useful (and entertaining in some cases) comments. The other bad thing is that the old site isn't running ads. OK, you might think that's a good thing :-)

So tonight I decided to fix this. Here's how I did it.