Debugging Web Sites

Dave Taylor — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:13:30 +0000

I know, I'm in the middle of a series of columns about how to work with ImageMagick on the command line, but when other things arise, well, I imagine that a lot of you are somehow involved in the management of servers or systems, so you all understand firefighting.

Of course, this means you all also understand the negative feedback loop that is an intrinsic part of system administration and IT management. I mean, people don't call you and the CEO doesn't send a memo saying, "system worked all day, printer even printed. Thanks!"

Nope, it's when things go wrong that you hear about them, and that propensity to ignore the good and have to deal with the bad when it crops up is not only a characteristic of being in corporate IT, it's just as true if you're running your own system—which is how it jumped out of the pond and bit me this month.

It all started ten years ago with my Ask Dave Taylor site. You've probably bumped into it, as it's been around for more than a decade and served helpful tutorial information for tens of millions of visitors in that period.

Ten years ago, the choice of Movable Type as my blogging platform made total sense and was a smart alternative to the raw, unfinished WordPress platform with its never-ending parade of hacks and problems. As every corporate IT person knows, however, sometimes you get locked in to the wrong platform and are then stuck, with the work required to migrate becoming greater and greater each month nothing happens.

For the site's tenth anniversary, therefore, it was time. I had to bite the bullet and migrate all 3,800 articles and 56,000 comments from Movable Type to WordPress, because yes, WordPress won and is clearly the industry standard for content management systems today.

The task was daunting, not just because of the size of the import (it required the consulting team rewriting the standard import tool to work with that many articles and comments), but because the naming scheme changed. On Movable Type, I'd always had it set to convert the article's name into a URL like this:

Name: Getting Started with Pinterest

URL: /getting_started_with_pinterest.html

That was easy and straightforward, but on WordPress, URLs have dashes, not underscores, and, more important, they don't end with .html because they're generated dynamically as needed. This means the default URL for the new WordPress site would look like this:

New URL: /getting-started-with-pinterest/

URLs can be mapped upon import so that the default dashes become underscores, but it was the suffix that posed a problem, and post-import there were 3,800 URLs that were broken because every single link to xx_xx.html failed.

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Debugging Web Sites