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> Your blog or website software should really be setting up those redirects for page moves automatically. There is theory and there is practice. Keeping URLs t
by adaboese 3y ago
> Your blog or website software should really be setting up those redirects for page moves automatically.
There is theory and there is practice. Keeping URLs tidy is a simple task for a small site, but as the application/blog grows in scope, it becomes almost an impossible/full-time job. Anyone who managed a platform with thousands of pages (I've had the luck to do that), will tell you that 404s are not avoidable. Feature flags, geofenching, and many more edge cases will inevitably lead to users experiencing 404s. This tactics is more mitigating the impact of those edge cases.
- gwern 3y ago> (I've had the luck to do that) I have 20,000+ files/pages on gwern.net where I try to fix 404s for over the past 13 years or so that I've been building it, so I am well aware of the difficulty in maintaining links (particularly across very large changes in the website structure), and the perverse ingenuity of bots, scanners, and real users in coming up with brandnew 404s. > it becomes almost an impossible/full-time job. That it cannot be solved perfectly in full generality is true, but nevertheless, that is not an excuse to not set a redirect for the very simple and common case of 'mv foo.html bar.html', and all website software should support that.
- adaboese 3y agoAll good points. I don't think we are disagreeing on anything, it seems I am just more adventurous when it comes to pioneering solutions and learning by doing it. Will continue to learn from this experiment.