Yesterday I wanted to find out a way to finally de-cruft my URLs. I did a search and found my own site. Lame. I was looking for the excellent and simple way that Mark Pilgrim had de-crufted his URLs back when he used Movable Type. After recovering from Googleshock, I found his tutorial and 20 minutes later, boom, de-crufted URLs.
Why mess about with stuff when the site seems to be working? There are many reasons for this, the first being that I’d like to start messing about with PHP includes, the second is that I’m using dynamic archives, so it doesn’t matter what the file extension is on my archives, and I’d like to be the guinea pig so that when we move the mothership over to dynamic publishing, no one gets hurt.
I had reservations about this because of the newness of Movable Type’s dynamic archiving. However, if you follow the directions with Movable Type and the Mark PIlgrim tutorial, the .htaccess stuff handles redirecting people from your old URLs to the new ones. The database and server handle it all. Sweet. I did have to turn off the custom error page that my host allowed me to make, but who said de-crufting didn’t come with a cost?
At any rate, let me know if you see any problems or can’t access things. I’ll fire a memo off to myself as well as fine myself for incompetence.
UPDATE: As part of Mr. Pilgrim’s instructions, he notes making a Redirect call on the archives directory. With Movable Type 3.x and dynamic archiving, you don’t need the Redirect line. You probably don’t need anything, as they seem to have solved it all, but it made me feel powerful to create and edit a .htaccess file. Sweet. Now if I could just get the most recent posts to show up on my archive pages.
UPDATE: Finally. I finally have a PHP include working. I am, as the kids say, getting up in the grill of the Individual Archive Page.