I usually don’t have time to look through the archives of my blog at my leisure, but while working on Google sitemap stuff I found out that Google had discovered a number of 404 “file not found” errors on my blog. A number of them were due to my changing URL format way back in November. I used to have a redirect in place but it disappeared somewhere!

After fixing that little bug I took a look around at some of the old photos from 2005 and was pleasantly surprised at my own reaction. I haven’t see most of these photos in several months so I had forgotten about them and here I am, saying to myself, “I took that? That’s a nice photo!”

Self praise is no praise as they say but I liked what I saw and that fills me with renewed energy and enthusiasm for the sometimes daily slog of posting a new picture every day. So what if I’m no Chromasia or Daily Dose of Imagery or Thomas Hawk! We do what we do and do the best we can.

So, go look up your archives and be happy!

After that rather rambling monologoue, here’s something useful for all you blog owners. I changed the format of my URLs after a discussion with Tom Raftery. In the course of conversation Tom told me that he used the domin.tld/post-name/ format for his blog instead of the usual domain.tld/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/. In that way, the all important post title is snuggled up next to his name in the address of the post! Good for search engines, good for finding information.

I did the same here, but I had posts already written in the old format. I needed a mod_rewrite rule to redirect those URLs to the new ones! Here it is, in all it’s glory! Add this to your .htaccess and it will transform http://inphotos.org/2005/10/08/into-town/ to http://inphotos.org/into-town/

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/(.*)/ /$4/ [R=301,L]

That bit of code adds a “Permanent Redirect” to the new location. There may still be links pointing at the old URL but Google should hopefully know that it has been moved.

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