Looking at the analytics for this site I realized something that should have been obvious even without looking. Every link into this blog, including those provided by search engines, is wrong. People are searching for things like Ubuntu Qube, following the links they find, and landing on a 404 Not Found page. Then they leave. This is bad for visitors and for my page rank.

I don’t really have time to fool with it and my blog isn’t of such compelling interest (e.g., it doesn’t generate revenue) that I feel motivated to do anything about it. However, as a mental exercise I was thinking of how to deal with it. Here’s my plan:

Old links point to things to articles with URL’s in the form of www.prairienet.org/~jtuttle/blog/item/134/.
I could code my 404 page to parse the URL, determine if it’s an old bBlog link, and to obtain the article ID to the old bBlog article. I could then query the bBlog article table for that ID and return the article title. With the article title I could query the new Wordpress article table for that article. If found, I could automatically return the correct article with a 301 Moved Permanently header. I’d have also have to accommodate /section/section_name links. Easy. I’m still not going to do. It’s spring.