Since I’ve programmed all the under-the-hood mechanics of this site myself, there are a few things you’ll find in other blog engines that are missing from this site. Some of them are because I don’t have the programming know-how, but mostly it’s just because I’m lazy and I don’t want to do the work.
Today I finally sat down to fix one of those things: the ugly permalinks. When I wrote the system in the first place, I left the permalinks to each of the entries kind of ugly, with the EntryID visible in the address bar. So if you ever glanced at the URL, it wouldn’t tell you a lot about the link you were about to go to. Here’s an example.
Old style:
https://aroundcarson.com/blogs/aroundcarson/37
I don’t like links like that, but at the time I just wanted to get the system going, so I left it alone. I could always fix it later, right? Well, it took until today to fix it, five months after I launched the new system. That’s my procrastination at work again. Anyway, the new URLs should be a little more familiar to those of you who read a lot of blogs.
New style:
https://aroundcarson.com/2005/09/02/the_reno_condo_invasion
There’s the date of the post in there, as well as the title. So much more information, so one look at the link tells you exactly what you’re going to see. I feel a lot better about the site now; this was a big thing that was bothering me. I have redirects set up so the old URLs will automatically take you to the new ones, so if you have any bookmarks you don’t have to worry about them breaking.
As always, let me know if anything is broken. In a sense, everyone who reads this site is a bug tester.
I’ve also had an RSS feed this whole time, but I just now put the link to it back on the sidebar. Now I just have to get to work on the other things on my list, like tagging. That one should be a joy to program.
