Try as you might at the beginning of a project, you are bound to get some detail wrong. Often this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does. I got the permalink structure on this site wrong at the beginning, and the longer I left it the harder it became to fix. Today I finally fixed it.
The problem with permalinks are that untreated ones are ugly, and treated ones (“pretty permalinks” in WordPress parlance) are not necessarily any prettier, and can be downright unhelpful.
The reason for the default structure (which in my case would be something like http://wwww.owenkelly.net?p=123) is explained very well in an article on the thuledingles site. This site is an interesting long-term personal research project whose author has developed some ideas not dissimilar to mine:
I have developed a couple related heretical views about the Internet and websites. One, the dictum that the URL should be fixed, permanent and sacrosanct appears dubious. Second, published content can be edited – improved – so easily, it now seems questionable that documents should be frozen in the form they attained on some particular calendar-date. Or that we should even keep track of its stages of development, as done by the Wikipedia project.
The documents within a website can benefit from being reorganized as time, perception & perspective progress. With database-driven applications this is easier to do, and seems less sacrilegious because such websites do not use ‘real’ URLs anyway (Permalinks notwithstanding). But the distinction is thin: reassigning relationships among content-items is functionally the same as giving them new URLs.
Lorelle VanFossen, a prominent WordPress author, emboldens my idea of the open-ended evolving document, with a post from last year: “Do You Update Posts or Post Updates?”. When we elect to ‘update’ our posts, they become a different document than the URL formerly pointed to.
My reasons for changing my permalink structure are connected with the intended logic of this site, and the ongoing memi project. When I began the WordPress version of the site I spent some time reading about permalinks, and how to use them. It was quite clear that one of their purposes was to enable every entry to have a unique identifier. The standard way to do this was to incorporate the date into the link, so that this entry might become http://wwww.owenkelly.net/2008/01/28/permalinks-a-step-forward – leaving me free to write an article with the same title in a day or so.
I soon came to see that this built into the page links exactly the kind of blog structure that I was trying to remove from the site. I had no use for the creation date of each article, but I did have several uses for the article ID. So I decided to change the permalinks to something that would be much more useful – something like http://wwww.owenkelly.net/523/permalinks-a-step-forward, which contains only information I might actually want.
The question was: how?
On Saturday, surfing while Auo was at a party near Arcada, I found Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration Plugin, and today I installed it (or rather the recently patched version that seems to have some vulnerabilities fixed). Dean’s site explains what the plug-in actually does:
Many people want to change their permalink structure. But doing so will make all pages indexed by search engines become invalid,moreover, losing visitors from other sites or bookmarks that links to you.
There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permenantly moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one . It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect.When you do this, Search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank.you will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.
By now, you know how can you change your permalinks without losing the traffic you’re already getting. You can download this Permalink Migration Plugin to achieve this for you.
This plugin will generates a “301 Redirect” when user or spider visit your site through old permalinks,and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post.
I have spent the last fifteen minutes testing it, and it fixes all the internal links that I have made. I shall use it and then slowly, week by week, go through the old entries and update the internal links. The external links will benefit from this permanently.