Back when I used Movable Type on this site all the URLs for individual posts were in the form of 0000322.shtml or whatever & when I migrated to WordPress these changed into text based links i.e. /a-post-about-whatever. Anyway, it updated most of the internal links during the migration process, but any external ones that pointed at the numerical URLs ended up with a 404 error in the new system. After being annoyed about this for awhile I finally found a good plug-in to help resolve the issue today. Basically it lets me change any 404 error into a 301 redirect and point visitors at the appropriate new URL. Better yet, it keeps track of any 404 errors as they happen, so I don’t even have to go hunting around for broken links, I can just wait for them to show up in the log and take care of it at my leisure. (Of course I do have a complete list of broken links thanks to Google’s Webmaster Tools, but there are like 55 of them and I don’t feel like fixing them all at the moment, particularly since I’m sure nobody clicks on like 99% of them). As an added byproduct I think I will also be able to see if people are typing weird nonsense URLs like antinomian.com/secretpassword or whatever into my site. If any particularly funny ones come up, I’ll be sure to share them…
[UPDATE] Revelation #1: I need to make a favicon!
0 Responses to “Sweet Plugin”