April 14, 2004
Long Live [Insert Blog Name Here]
Blogging has become a regular part of my life. When contemplating a particularly "blogable" topic, I often find myself composing a post in my head. I have no doubt that I will continue to blog for many years to come. The idea of a blog that is five, ten, or even twenty years old, is a bit mind-boggling. Most blogs out there are, at most, two years old; very few were around before then, and if they were, they most likely weren't blogs yet. How will our current blogging platforms handle five years of data? What about ten years? Blogging platforms notwithstanding, five years is a heck of a lot of information to sort through if you wan't to pull something up quickly (thankfully, some guy has been working on a thing called Blogdigger...).
This all points to the fact that a little pre-planning can save a whole lot of time later on. There's lots of little things that could be called good blogging practices; one I've been wanting to implement for a while has to do with the URL structure for individual entries. By default, MovableType generates a URL that looks like this:
http://presence.baltiblogs.com/archives/001045.html
The page name, 001045.html, is generated by MovableType, corresponding to the number entry of total entries on this server (which means something weird is going to happen when Baltiblogs goes over 999,999 posts). You'll notice that this URL tells you absolutely nothing about the entry it points to.
Starting today, however, with a little help from Maphet, I set MovableType to generate a new URL for each entry composed of the date of the entry and the title. A new URL looks like this:
http://presence.baltiblogs.com/2004/04/09/pesach_food_spotlight_t_abrahams_crispyos.html
Now, by just perusing the URL, I get information about the date and title of the entry. This adds just a tiny bit more information to each of my blog posts, making my wisdom just a bit more accesible for future generations.
To set up your MovableType blog to publish your archives this way, go to Weblog Config/Archiving/, and for Individual Entries, replace the blank text with:
<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html
this looks good BUT, I think its also creating the same format as before with the web pages. Meaning, if I make the URL into a title with a date, the numbers (ie /../001045.html etc) still count up so once you get to the max, you're still going to have to figure something out.
I'm not sure that made sense.
Posted by: aishel at April 14, 2004 3:23 PMMakes sense -- I wonder if it breaks existing links when MT regenerates? I guess I'll try it and find out...
Posted by: Rob at April 14, 2004 3:23 PMBaltiblogs, at least, seems not to overwrite the old pages (which is what you are seeing, Natan), so they will still hang around. The only other side effect I can think of relates to Google, but over time that should cancel itself out. This method will not go through your old posts and update links you have to your own blog.
Posted by: Greg at April 14, 2004 3:40 PMNow if we could make a seperate series of number based on the *users* then it would be great, because we then get in essence unlimited posts. The problem is we're all running off one copy of the MT software. (which then leads to many other security issues, but we won't talk about that :-D)
Posted by: aishel at April 14, 2004 5:01 PMThere's a couple of ways to create redirects for all of your old posts, so that any requests for your old posts will go to the new posts. I'll try to have something worked out soon ...
Also, at the current rate Baltiblogs is going through posts (~3k/yr), I estimate it will be around 300 years before we run out of id's. I think you're safe for now, Natan.
Posted by: maphet at April 14, 2004 5:12 PMPhew! (wipes the sweat off my forehead) :-D
And thanks again for doing a great job here at baltiblogs, you rock!
Posted by: aishel at April 14, 2004 5:45 PMI finally got around to doing this. Very cool. Thanks.
Posted by: aishel at October 19, 2004 9:39 PM
