Switching Blogging Software
This blog started out called the unblog back when blog was a new-ish term and I thought it was silly. I'd been on mailing lists like fork and Kragan Sitaker's tol for years and couldn't see a difference between those and blogs. I set up some mailing list archive software to look like a blog and called it a day.
Years later that platform was aging, and wikis were still a new and exciting concept, so I built a blog around a wiki. The ease of online editing was nice, though readers never took to wiki-as-comments like I hoped. It worked well enough for a good many years, but I kept having a hard time finding my own posts in Google. Various SEO-blocking strategies Google employs that I hope never to have to understand were pushing my entries below total crap.
Now, I've switched to blohg as a blogging platform. It's based on Mercurial my version control system of choice and has a great local-test and push to publish setup. It uses ReStructured-Text which is what wiki text became and reads great as source or renders to HTML. Thanks to Rafael Martins for the great software, templates, and help.
The hardest part of the whole setup was keeping every URL I've ever used internally for this blog still valid. URLs that "go dead" are a huge pet peeve of mine. Major, should-know-better sites do this all the time. The new web team brings up brand new site, and every URL you'd bookmarked either goes to a 404 page or to the main page. URLs are supposed to be durable, and while it's sometimes a lot of work to keep that promise it's worth it.
In migrating this site I took a couple of steps to make sure URLs stayed valid. I wrote a quick script to go through the HTTP access logs site for the last few months, looked for every URL that got a non-404 response, and turned them into web requests and made sure that I had all the redirects in place to make sure the old URLs yielded the same content on the staging site. I did the same essential procedure when I switched from mailing list to wiki so I had to re-aim all those redirects too. Finally, I ran a web spider against the staging site to make sure it had no broken internal links. Which is all to say, if you're careful you can totally redo your site without breaking people's bookmarks and search results -- please let me know if you find a broken one.
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