So I got the redesign of the blog done a while ago, and I am pleased with its appearance now. There was one final thing I was not happy with, the URLs. I didn't like the 000100.html links as they didn't really say anything. That's easy enough to change, MT has some publish settings that govern how your templates get named into the file system, the hard part was keeping the old URLs around but redirecting them to the new location, and not having to figure that all out by hand. With 300+ entries, plus categories and monthly archives, I wanted an easy way to create the Apache Redirect rules.

I'm not a fan of MT's license, but I have to say I am a fan of their software. They are they only blog CMS that I know of that lets me create arbitrary templates at arbitrary times. Armed with this seemingly insignificant feature I had MT create the Redirect rules for me! It only got one section wrong (the categories) but I could fix them all by hand. In no time at all I had all my rules for a permanent redirect from my old URLs to my new ones.

Yeah, so I'm a little geeky, and I was nearly ecstatic when I discovered I could use an MT template to do my dirty work for me.

[composed and posted with ecto]