I’m not here to teach, but I wrote this for a web marketing blog at work that never went live. Didn’t want it to go to waste.

Thinking about a website upgrade? Is it on a new system with all new pages? Is anyone thinking about the links to the old pages? You’ll want to make sure you can identify and redirect the most important ones for the sake of your users and your Google rankings.

There will be various ways to get this list depending on your setup, but one good way is to get a report from your analytics tool (Google Analytics is a popular example). Most tools can provide a list of the most commonly visited URLs over a certain date range. Set that range to a year or so and you’ll have a hefty list of your most important pages. Next you’ll want to use your analytics software’s export feature (most will have this capability) to save the list into a text or excel format. If you don’t see an Excel specific format, look for an export format called Comma Separated Values (CSV)  which can be opened by Excel.

While your website may have had many more working links, discovering them and redirecting them to appropriate pages on the new site will offer diminishing returns due to their light use.

Now that you’ve got the list of URLs you want to keep alive, you’ll want to identify the best matches for them on the new site. The matches don’t have to be exact. For instance, we redirected all our old individual calendar events and news items to our new “News and Events” page. That said, avoid redirecting the entire list to the homepage of your new site if you can. This isn’t helpful for users and Google even explicitly recommends against this in the great video on this page about 301 and 302 redirects. That page even includes some links on how to actually code these changes on your web server.

If you have questions about any of the specifics just post in the comments!

Comments weren’t working on this blog for some reason.

Problem

When trying to post you’d be redirected to the post’s URL followed by /comment-page/#comment-. But, it should look more like this /comment-page-1/#comment-74. I’d also get an email about a new comment, but all the normal fields would be blank, i.e. Author, Email, URL, WHOIS, and Comment.

Testing:

Googling the problem I found this issue is usually caused by bad permalink structures. So I made sure the htaccess file is writable and only contains the automatically generated wordpress lines. I even temporarily removed my root folder htaccess file for a minute but that didn’t fix the comments (though it did have all the folders display indexes, 1990s style.)

Since I do use a custom link structure (/%year%/%postname%/) I turned it off and still had the same problem. With it off I got this URL:
http://www.robertpate.net/blog/?p=200#comment-

And that URL did not 404! But there was still no new comment. Looking at it I realized that the comment should have an ID on the end, but didn’t. So it wasn’t a permalinks problem, it was a “comments aren’t getting saved to the database” problem.

I updated all the wordpress files and switched to the new theme, just in case. But since that didn’t solve anything I logged into cPanel and was able to run a check and repair on the database. It threw some nasty errors, and then the repair fixed them all in the span of about 60 seconds.

Today I Learned: 1. Databases can trip and hurt themselves. 2. Timeout errors while uploading via FTP may be due to being on a virtual machine.

Still ranked 6. Google has picked up my new blog title and my previous post. The current list looks like this: RP’s (robert pate’s) on the White Pages, an RP on linkedIn, an RP on Facebook, the RP wikipedia entry, the RP Cal State page (cstv), and then me. If you’re testing your own stuff don’t forget to clear your cookies or just open a private browser session. Google will customize your results otherwise.

Next question: Should I 301 or 302 from robertpate.net to robertpate.net/blog? hanselman.com uses a 301, but I haven’t run across a lot of other blogs doing the same. Currently I’m using a 302.

I think I’ll test that next. While I worry that doing a 301 redirect may make my root domain less potent if I ever added content there, I will do it anyway, for science!

Back when I was dabbling in writing, I familiarized myself with the various Creative Commons Licenses. Now as a programmer I’m familiarizing myself with the various Free Software Licenses.

Unfortunately, the official list is worthless to someone who doesn’t already understand the differences between the basic types. In googling the issue, I found a few helpful resources: a “quick ref license chooser” which is a great idea but didn’t help this noob a whole lot, and this video from redhat entitled “Open source software licenses explained.” The video was the biggest help and is worth the 6 minutes it takes to watch.

But what I really wanted was something as simple as creative commons. But I couldn’t find one so I drew up this comparison. The licenses are obviously *not* the same. Nor are they compatible in many cases. This is only a loose comparison. But I’m hoping that this should still increase understanding for those coming from FSF to CC or vica versa.

1. Attribution-Only – “permissive / non-protective” licenses, i.e. FreeBSD
2. Attribution-ShareAlike – “copyleft / protective” licenses, i.e. GPL
3. Attribution-NoDerivs – Here you would keep the source proprietary, but distribute the installer as freeware.

Each of these CC licenses also has a NonCommerical variant that prevents commercial use, but I couldn’t find a parallel to it in free software licenses. Why that is could probably be a whole separate blog post.

For further reading, check out this David Wheeler post on why you should use GPL for your software, the BSD licenses Wikipedia entry, the GNU instructions on how to include GPL in your project, and CC faq entry for why you can’t use a creative commons license on software.

I’ve moved my blog around a lot over the years. I did this again recently because I realized I was getting 9th place in search results for my name. As a web admin I should be ranking higher simply because I know how to setup a site for good SEO.

So I decided to fix my site up and at the same time test a lot of the best practices.

Since i’m targeting Robert Pate as keywords, i changed the title of my blog from robertpateii to Robert Pate II. I’m not sure how google treats spaces, but I figured an exact match would be better than a psuedo match. I moved back to robertpate.net instead of robertpateii.com for the same reason.

Also .net made more sense to me, subjectively. I’m not a commercial enterprise. I’m not a networking company either, but at least it’s the right industry for me.

I also made sure I was redirecting everything to www so that there isn’t any duplicate content. Redirected all the old urls from when the blog was on robertpateii.com, and finally updated wordpress manually.

Oh and I posted this so that there’s some fresh content. In a week or two i’ll update this with my new google rank.

June 11th, 2011 Update:
6 days later and i’m now ranked 6 for Robert Pate, but google hasn’t picked up my new blog title yet. The ones in front of me are whitepages, linkedin, wikipedia, cstv.com, and justia.com. That’s not bad for having little content and no one linking to this site. There are 2 obvious next steps: go through all my online spaces and link to my own domain and adding useful content.

July 8th, 2011 Update:
See the SEO Update Post.

Do you use wordpress too? Are you more interested in awesome than in hope?

Then take my Dance Commander Plugin, which replaces the “Hello, Dolly” lyrics with all the lyrics from “Dance Commander” by Electric Six.

This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the awesomeness and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in six words sung most famously by Dick Valentine: You Must Obey the Dance Commander. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from “Dance Commander” in the upper middle of your admin screen on every page. It can be active at the same time as the original Hello Dolly plugin.

Update on January 14th, 2011: I’ve uploaded a new copy of this plugin that changes the styling back to the original settings. This means you cannot have both on at the same time, but I think it looks better. Here: Dance Commander Plugin – Original Styling

I’ve been working on a user forum for my company. The solution we’re using has built in translations of the interface, but the translation of the user-generated content is necessarily a completely separate project.

I haven’t seen many other sites translate it either. Judging from the forums I’ve used, it’s because this tech is beyond the current scope of most forums’ capabilities. But happily there are a few neat things being done these days, such as Ted Talks allowing open translation of their talks and Meedan enabling multi-lingual dialogue.

The Meedan article is especially interesting. They use automatic machine translation on every comment, and allow open editing by translators. It’s my hope that this kind of crowd sourcing and  good machine translation can out-pace the compartmentalization of the internet caused by language barriers.

Such implementations are not free or easy to implement, even if you’re leveraging the crowd. But English is not going to remain the common language of the internet forever. Does the possibility of three or four different internets worry you? Have you seen other websites out there handling this well? I bet that someone, somewhere, is hard at work on an open-source project to solve this problem.