Good evening folks,
I haven’t posted up in a while, as I’ve been busy coding the backend of the blog and making it look nice on the eyes. This being a photography blog I wouldn’t usually post this up (as it’s more web design/web dev inclined) but I’ve spend the last two days trying to fix a problem and nothing online has been of help.
The Plan
I wanted to have nice permalinks on my blog. The plan was to have them like this – blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/day/month/year/name-of-the-post/. So the last post I had up would have looked like this – http://blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/03/02/2009/first-dublin-strobist-meet/. To do this I used the code /%day%/%monthnum%/%year%/%postname%/ within my wordpress admin control panel (Settings >> Permalinks >> Custom).
The Problem
All links worked perfectly EXCEPT the archive links. So what worked?
blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/
blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/day/month/year/name-of-the-post/
blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/category/name-of-category/
What didn’t work where the archive links, like March 2008 or January 2009. They would purely bring up an error #404.
You could change your permalinks to /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and everything would work find. Personally, I felt that the links were starting to get too long. After lots of searching and testing a bunch of easy and difficult solutions I decided to give in and change my Permalinks. I am now only using /%postname%/
Search Engines?
What about the big G and everybody linking back to your old links that you previously had in place? Simple, just add the following line
RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4
to your .htaccess file in your wordpress directory and it will redirect all your traffic for you. So if somebody clicks a link or types in http://blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/30/01/2009/inspirational-photography-tips/ they will be automatically redirected to http://blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/inspirational-photography-tips/.
Nobody gets lost, no broken links and the big G doesn’t spank you!!
I hope that helps somebody from spending two days searching online for a fix.
Let me know if it helps,
Kyle
