Well, as I discuss on my personal pages, I’ve recently revamped the website. Some of the changes have been aesthetic, but others are technical behind the scenes changes.
Firstly, I’ve put a sidebar on the individual archive pages. This wasn’t particularly straight forward, as I’m not a CSS expert by any measure. It essentially required the Individual Archive template to be changed such that the main ’style’ was “content” not “container”. The stripped down sidebar is similar to the main page side bar, and is the last set of div’s before the closing ‘body’ HTML tag.
Secondly, I wanted to have meaningful archive file names, and elise.com proved helpful here. One thing to add though, I wanted to keep the old files (links and such), but didn’t want to munge ALL of my weblog pages manually. Despite having plenty of perl tricks up my sleeve, I ’simply’ put the meta-refresh tag at the top of the individual archive template, ie. I added the tag:
meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”3;url=”MT_TAG”
Where MT_TAG is the archive file format tag I proposed to put in the weblog archive configuration. The key thing here is to add it FIRST to the template, then do a complete rebuild, THEN remove the tag from the top of the template, add it to the Weblog config section, and do ANOTHER rebuild.
This first build puts the redirect tag into the ‘old’ archive style, so the redirect to your new page will be in every page. Taking it out, changing the weblog config then builds out the new structure. So, consequenbtly, a visitor to any of the old pages gets properly redirected across to the new filename page.
Hopefully that makes sense. I also hope you like the new website. Comments are much appreciated.
