More changes to the website
July 19, 2006 – 11:20 pmI’ve decided to change the way that the posts on my website are named and stored. I had previously been using a generic incremental numbering scheme to name them automatically for me. So the filename for any given post page would have been something like 00000123.php. I never paid much attention to this to tell you the truth.
But recently I’ve started noticing that most popular blogs name their posts in a much different manner. They use the /year/month/day/title format. For instance, the link to my previous post is archives/2006/07/19/birthday_wishes.php. This is actually more pleasing to the eye if you ask me, not to mention being more usable in search results or when sharing a link.
There is a downside to changing my format now. Any inbound links will be broken. However, I don’t suspect that this will cause much drama around the internet as there aren’t exactly hundreds of links to individual posts on my site floating around.
So I flipped the switch in Movable Type to make the change, but I still had to go through and rename nearly all of my old posts as there had been a character limit imposed on the file names. Only about 8 of them actually were under this limit. The rest had to be manually changed.
Another change is the way that my archives work. Previously, each archived category page was a file like /archives/cat_friends.php. Now it’s /archives/friends/. The date based archive pages look much neater now as well. The archive page for July of 2006, for example, is /archives/2006/07. Much neater indeed.
[EDIT] I have just completed going through each post and enabling trackbacks. That was fun! At least I only have about 60 entries to wade through at this point.
