I have moved my blog from one system to another and at the same time upgrade to the latest and greatest WordPress version. Using the default link structure in WordPress gives links like: http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/?p=115 when a more logical link name is: http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/2008/11/17/op5-monitor-or-nagios-plugins-for-1-wire-temperature-measurement/
The more logical name gives date and title of the blog post instead of a cryptic number. Changing from one to another is rather simple, just change it in the wordpress settings, but there is several drawbacks:
- Referers stop working, if someone is refering to your pages they will stop working until someone updates the link
- Search engines will refer to the wrong page until the pages are indexed again and very likely the rank will drop
- WordPress internal references will stop working, so the mainpage links will stop working. This is real stupid and I do not understand why WordPress behaves like this.
The solution is to install the plugin "Permalinks Moved Permanently" which fixes this problem, make sure that the webserver allows rewrite.
Links
- The plugin used Permalinks Moved Permanently
- A webpage describing howto enable mod_rewrite for Ubuntu Server.
