351 words
To never touch a working system
is common knowledge - and very hard to stick to if you're only slightly playful or curious.
I've been unhappy with my URLs here for a while now. But being unhappy about something and knowing better is one thing – while actually doing something is quite another. Thus seeing Mark Pilgrim explaining important steps for getting better URLs was very helpful and helped overcome my inertia.
As a consequence, I don't have a weekly archive here anymore but archives for individual posts. I might have done all this earlier if there weren't constraints on the disk space we can use, which mean I can't keep two copies of my archives around. Currently, manually browsing the archive folders is the only way to access entries chronologically. I'm not sure I want to change that as hardly anyone seems to browse chronologically anyway and calendars seem useless or a lot of work to get right.
To ensure existing links continue working, I had to get my hands dirty using mod_rewrite before moving the old weekly archives to a university server with the appropriate forwarding in place. Seeing that mod_rewrite is a power tool and I am a kid, this may not have been too wise. It seems to work OK but I suspect there may be quirks left in some places. Let me know what you think and how the transition works for you. Additional suggestions are welcome.
While adapting my templates for the new situation I was pleasantly surprised that only few changes were needed. Movable Type is quite clever at putting the correct, new permalinks everywhere. This is also the time where it paid that I don't use relative links within my own site.
I also think I may have discovered a little bug in Safari: When an http request is 'rewritten' Safari seems to forget the anchor part of the request. As far as I know the anchor part isn't sent to the web server, so the browser should take care of not losing it – as Camino does, by the way.
I’ve noticed the same bug with the anchor in Safari, with my pMachine URLs. Works fine in both Explorer and Camino. Annoying :).
Should report it to Apple, as I did, if you haven’t done so yet.
Cheers,
I reported it as well, so there might be hope. Generally I had the impression the Safari people make quite an effort to get it right ‘under the hood’. I’m not too sure about the UI, though.
Fingers crossed.
