What to do about old URLs

[d6y]

Hello!

I have collected different URLs for pages in my blog over the years. I'm hoping to pick your collective brains about what to do about that while settling into Pagecord.

For example, I have a page that would end up as "/giant-squid" which has a history of URLs: /posts/giant-squid, /posts/2021-05-02-squid/, /2021/05/02/squid.html and possibly /2021/05/02/squid

What I've come up with so far is:

1. Do nothing. Let the old URLs die. Who cares anyway, really. The search engines will catch up soon enough, and I can potentially submit URLs to them (hmm: might need a sitemap.xml for that).

These other two possibilities would need things added to Pagecord, I think:

2. Do 1, but also have a custom 404 page in Pagecord and maybe I list on there the most common pages I think people would be looking for (based on analytics).

3. For every post have a list of aliases — you see this sometimes in the front-matter of static site generators. A slog, but not impossible.

Have I missed any tricks?

Thank you!

[lylo]

Assuming you're doing this with your own custom domain, why not use your DNS provider to rewrite these old URLs to the new Pagecord one? Maybe it depends on provider but Cloudflare certainly let you do this.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/rules/transform/url-rewrite/

I've been in a similar situation over the years (I let old things die) whicch is why I decided on just a simple slug for pages and posts. In theory it makes the whole thing more portable.

I don't think I would add support into Pagecord for this use case.

[d6y]

Thanks @lylo — I didn't realise that was possible via DNS providers, so thanks for the tip.

[lylo]

I believe it's only some DNS providers, so YMMV 😬 Let me know how you get on