After noticing tens of thousands of 404 errors on this site, I got to wondering what was wrong. I noticed that lots and lots of the blog entries were no longer being found, since I've separated my general blather from our RMI adventure.

Evidently the blog software, although it moved the articles, didn't track those moves and keep track of the old and new URIs. That is kind of a tall order, especially given how it seems to keep the "aggregate" blog kind of dumb compared to the others.

Each article is assigned one or more "slugs." This one, for example, will have "redirects-added" as one slug and a shorter slug "bH7" associated with it. While these slugs seem to be unique in the system, they're associated with the blog, so "/bH7" won't work, but "/weBlog/bh7" will. Unfortunately, it used to be the case that /bH7 would have been the right short slug for this article.

I put some keys in action and added a dozen or so rules to the Apache configuration to make redirects to the rearranged blog. This should fix all of the sniffers and snoopers and people getting here via Twitter and Facebook links.

My rearranging took my once-only blog, General Blather, and forced a prefix "weBlog," to be prepended to the slugs help separate the articles. The new blog, Adventure RMI, was given the prefix "rmi." I've added some specific rules for the articles that were in weBlog but are now in rmi, and then made everything else default to the weBlog blog.

Not every fringe case has been investigated; since I had a fixed set of faillures to work with, I focused on those. Apologies if you got a broken link in the meantime. I'll peek back at the log in the future and see what I've missed, and hopefully fix them, too.