Here’s my progress report on my to-do list for the weekend. We’ll go in reverse order.

#4 – Make blog 20% prettier

Haven’t started yet.

#3 – Write About page

Done. You can read the about page if you want. I didn’t give it much thought, but it turned out okay. I’m happy with it for now.

#2 – Update blogroll (from default WP links)

Done. I just went to my bookmarks and then added links to the blogs I visit the most. I also added links to my Myspace page and The Chalkboard Manifesto.

#1 – Fix blog archive links

Done. This took me several hours. (I was also watching TV at the same time. I finally watched Office Space.)

The problem was that URLs which looked like this http://www.agnoiology.com/2006/06/ weren’t working. The individual and daily entries were working, but the monthly pages weren’t. The monthly pages would open up my old MT monthly archives. When I tried deleting those index.html files, I’d get a file listing.

First thing I tried to mess around with was the MT templates. I used the individual entry template from Alex King’s solution for redirecting MT to WordPress (very good, highly recommend using it if you wish to make the same switch I did). Well, first, I had to decipher the damn thing and look up a few PHP commands. Eventually, I figured that this was a dead-end and I did nothing.

Second, I fixed it so I wasn’t getting the file listing anymore. But all that did was give me a 403 Error instead of a file listing.

So I tried a plain old redirect using .htaccess. I had to go into WordPress and go back to the old URL system to find that it was using /m?=200606 for example. I made index.html go to this. It worked, but now I was getting that ugly URL. I didn’t want that showing up because it would confuse people and because it was, well, ugly.

Next, I used mod_rewrite for the redirect. It took me a while to figure out what was even going on with mod_rewrite — it’s damn complicated, especially when one does not even know regular expressions. But I didn’t need the regular expressions. Eventually, I surfed google results for a while and found a simpler intro. I experimented with it and finally got the redirect to work. Mission accomplished.

Well, “mission accomplished” in the Bushian sense. I fixed that but broke everything else. Now the individual entries were giving me 404 errors. Argh!

Maybe the .htaccess files in the subdirectories were giving me problems. I tried putting the mod_rewrite WordPress code in the yearly and monthly subdirectories. No dice.

Okay, might the .htaccess file in the yearly directories be giving me trouble anyway? I mean, I had put those in there to allow HTML files to be treated as PHP files. (This has to do with the solution I used to redirect from MT to WordPress.) I deleted that, but no dice again. I put it back. That wasn’t giving me the problem.

I then thought that maybe WordPress was giving me the wrong code to put in my .htaccess file for those more friendly links. I temporarily changed the access to allow WordPress to write directly to the .htaccess file. Uh oh. 500 Server Error. Everything in WordPress was crashing. I manually uploaded the .htaccess file again and everything was well in the universe. That is, everything except my original problem.

Finally, I looked at the WordPress help file for permalinks a bit and something caught my eye about using a 404 redirect. I didn’t even read it through, but I experiment and I actually used 403 ErrorDocument to redirect things back to WordPress. Now the URL looks pretty and it goes where I want. Problem solved.

It wasn’t the most elegant solution. I had to go through and manually upload .htaccess files to all the monthly subdirectories and then delete all the index.html files. But I’m used to that mind-numbing repetitive stuff from work, so I bucked up and just did it. All done. Hooray.