Reconstruction Complete, Including Search Links
I finally did something I swore I would do weeks ago: I finished putting up all of the posts that were eaten or lost when I upgraded my blog site, and then decided that I was going to tackle the problem of cached links to the old site. When I first started using WordPress, I used the numerical indices for blogs, so links to entries had the form
http://agrosnowman.com/snowman/?p=34.
Not at all indicative of the content or potential puns included in the title. Upon re-install, I chose the compacted title as a permalink for each entry, which seemed like a good idea at 1:00 AM on a Saturday night when my wife was annoyed that I was typing rather than doing something more, well, productive.
After spending a few hours looking at PHP books, searching a bit, and some trial and error, I actually wrote a piece of code for the first time in about five years, and more miraculously, it works! If you go to one of the “old” entries via a cached link from any search engine, the little code snipped I put up will map that “p=##” mess into a proper blog title, and then redirect you. Writing code has never been my strong suit, and I still find it somewhat surprising that my prose writing has far outpaced my code writing when 25 years ago I couldn’t conceive of that ordering under any circumstances.
In any order, approach, or way, I’m pronouncing the Snowman back to full strength, with all previous content once again available, and in theory I shouldn’t drop anyone on the cold hard floor of the Internet. Now if only the Yankees’ bullpen could manage the same.