Code
TODO: Figure out why this isn't loading in MDX
So, the theory behind "permalinks" is that they are supposed to
stay the same. I'm breaking the rules and changing mine. The good
news is that because of the way Wordpress is built, links to the
old addresses won't break. Originally, when I set them up, the
format was: /blog/{year}/{month}/{day}/{post-title}. I'm removing
the {day} because it's overkill. When looking at a web page
address, it's nice to see the year and month the page was created,
but there isn't a whole lot of reason to for the day to be there.
The developers who built WordPress included a very nice feature
that handles these changes smoothly. Bacially, if it sees requests
for the old style address (which would potentially be coming in
from other sites), it automatically redirects them to the new
location. So, if an incoming link is pointing to something like
this:
<<link|http://www.alanwsmith.com/blog/2008/07/29/no-idea/|http://www.alanwsmith.com/blog/2008/07/29/no-idea/>>
WordPress will see it and automatically change it to remove the now
extranious "/29" part. This is a great example of a good software
design. If this wasn't handled and the format for the permalinks
was changed, any links to the old format would immediately be
broken. The user of the software shouldn't have to worry about
stuff like that, and because WordPress developers thought about and
designed for this, the user doesn't have to. It just works without
really thinking about it. Another nice example of good software
design is that if you remove the post-title from the address (e.g.
<<link|http://www.alanwsmith.com/blog/2008/07/|http://www.alanwsmith.com/blog/2008/07/)>>
you'll get a list of all the articles that were posted in the
corresponding month. Once again, very well thought out. Kudos to
the WordPress team.