Yay! I finally managed to get rid of those pesky dates in my blog’s URL and redirect the old ones to the new permalink structure.

If you noticed, my old blog URL used to read something like:
https://techbasedmarketing.com/ignite/08-30-2007/switching-to-full-feeds/

Now, it is:
https://techbasedmarketing.com/ignite/switching-to-full-feeds/657 and if you click on the old links, you’re redirected to the new URL.

So much better and shorter, all thanks to Dean’s Permalink Migration Plugin. I was going to write some code to do that but I’ll take a short cut if it works.

You might be wondering why I now have the numbers at the end of the URL now instead of just dropping everything and use the title. The reason is kinda technical. The whole deal with using dates in the beginning is to that there will never be two URLs alike.

I can write a post about carrot-cakes today and carrot-cakes a year later, the date differentiates the URL even though they both have carrot-cakes in it. When you take the date away, you remove the uniqueness of that page and the server gets confused because now you have two pages with the name carrot-cakes.

This won’t ever happen if you’re creating static HTML pages because your web editor software won’t let you save two pages with the same name. The numbers at the end are the post ids and are meant to put the uniqueness back into the URL so they are always unique and the server can always find the correct post.

Technorati Tags: permalink, modrewrite, WordPress