Blissful ignorance: Radio's lack of logs hides my sins

Paul Beard will do doubt mutter the West Coast equivalent of "duh!" when he reads this, but since I moved this weblog to my own box and can look at the web server logs, I'm discovering a number of bad links in items I've published over the last year. Not dead links - links that were once valid, but no longer are - but links that were incorrectly constructed in the first place.

When I was using Radio and hosting with Userland, I never saw the logs, and I was blissfully ignorant.

Of course, it was my fault that these links were bad in the first place; I published the items but never bothered to check them after they were published. As my friend John Sampson says, "Your gun, your bullet, your foot."

I know there are things that aren't right yet on this site. Part of that is caused by the way I moved over from Userland: I used wget to fetch a copy of all my pages from Userland (attempting to fix local links along the way), and published a copy of those pages on my new site. I then told radio to add a Meta Refresh tag to all my pages at Userland, directing them to the same URL at my new site. The result is that people see who hit my my old Radio pages see the same pages on the new box. But as I've pointed out, there were problems with some of the links originally, and I've added to them with the move.

What I really want is for the old URLs to work if people change radio.weblogs.com to weblog.bluepenguin.com in the URL. Over time, the next step will be to put redirects in place, redirecting from the the Radio-formatted pages in the old paths to the same content published from Movable Type. If I'm willing to dig into mod_rewrite again, I can probably make it all work in a couple of lines in my httpd.conf.