AlanBarber.Org
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Finished the site conversion
Well I believe I finished updating the site…
* I completed the final layout adjustments on the new site design.
This involved just cleaning up some templates to suit my taste as well as bringing in all the buttons and content from the sidebars of the old site design.
* All my old content has been brought into the new system.
Every single entry has been imported from the old website. I didn’t loose a single bit of information.
* I’ve converted all the old pages to the new layout.
I’ve managed to redo all the static pages (my computer, reading list, etc) so they match the new site design.
* I configured the server to redirect any traffic going to the old site to the new site.
I used some fancy tricks with mod_rewrite to have any request for the old blog pages get sent to the new blog.
For example. Here is the url for the first post I ever made with MT on the old blog:
http://www.alanbarber.org/blog/000001.html
Thanks to mod_rewrite I am able to send a user that requests that page to the post on the new EE blog here:
http://www.alanbarber.org/index.php/weblog/000001
This is done using the following mod_rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^blog/([0-9]+)\.html /index.php/weblog/$1 [R=301,L]
This tells the webserver that if anyone tries to access the old blog posts send them to the new blog post and tell them that the url has changed permanently.
If you don’t understand don’t worry it’s not that important. Suffice to say it does work.
Besides that mod_rewrite rule I use standard Redirect statements in my .htaccess file to redirect any requests for the category, monthly, rss feeds and non-blog pages (I converted the static html pages to php).
An example might look like this:
Redirect 301 /blog/archives.html http://www.alanbarber.org/index.php/weblog/archives/
Again this tells the webserver that if anyone tries to access the old archives page send them to the new one and tell them that that the url has changed permanently.
The 301 part says the url has changed permanently. For browsers they just ignore the message but this is handy for search engines. In theory a search engine should then remove the old url from their database and replace it with the new one.
All in All, there should be little if any lost traffic from the conversion. Any attempt to access the old content should get sent to the new content.
I must say ExpressionEngine has turned out to be a very nice application. It’s so powerful that in fact it’s almost overkill. Then again that’s just the way I like it! It’s nice knowing I have a strong solid base to build on for a change should I want too.
So I now return to my regular blogging schedule 
