Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Despite temperatures this coming week into the 90’s and potentially breaking all records, we are into fall and our best color should be coming out in the next two or three weeks. Now is when I need to get into my car and get the fall color photos I’ve been wanting, and to visit all the mills I’ve not been able to reach easily from St. Louis.
The traveling will also take me to Columbus to the state historical society to view some microfiche, and perhaps some other odds and ends places. I also have the book deadline for the middle of November, not to mention the work ongoing at my sites.
Today I made a static copy of the old Burningbird, using the Unix utility wget to create a mirror image; including getting copies of all photos and stylesheets and such. With this copy I can eliminate the WP installation and database. I can also make permanent redirects from various pages to the new sites when they’re up. (The way WordPress modifies .htaccess made this difficult at times.)
Both the main page and the feed are now redirected here, and we’ll see how this shows up in aggregators. Bloglines shows the new site, but still lists it as the old feed URI. Since this is a permanent redirect it should change the adress, as well as redirect the content.
This weblog is the last of the subdomain sites. The old reasons for creating subdomains, such as weblog.burningbird.net, rather than sub-directories, such as burningbird.net/weblog, don’t seem to be as important–people really don’t look at URLs, other than those that are too long to do anything easily with. The thought that weblog.burningbird.net is ‘more professional looking’ than burningbird.net/weblog assumes people pay attention to this, and I think people are hit with enough demanding their attention that they have none to spare for such fooflah.
As for using relative addressing for stylesheets and such, most of us use dynamic functionality to generate pages, and again, this doesn’t seem to be the issue it once was. It also doesn’t impact on search engine optimization–the bots are smart enough to know when a group of sites all belong to the same place.
I’m also never going to use date in my URLs again–why ever did we decide this was the way to do things? The date just makes the URL messier, and it’s a bitch to deal with backups. You have to watch us techs: we’re like your kids in that we say the darndest things at times. Use dates in your URL; don’t use dates in your URL.
If you comment and it goes into moderation or you email and I don’t respond right away, think of me at a mill surrounded by fall foliage, taking photos and enjoying the cool, crisp autumn weather. Or think of me in front of my computer intently working away–cat on my lap, head turned up to me going, “my turn, my turn”. Whichever scenario turns you on.