My website, like most people’s, is just a hobby. I work as a web developer (at least in part), and insom.me.uk gives me the chance to do things as correctly as I can, without having to worry about budget approval or the page scrolling when people use 640x480. It’s XHTML 1.0 Strict, it has valid CSS, <acronym title=”Really Several Synonyms”

RSS</acronym> and Atom, it’s automatically generated by a handful of scripts, and (ironically) its traffic out strips several of our commercial customers.

Of course, with it being my hobby, I feel the need to mess with it now and then. Sometimes I want to try out a new look (which I’ve done a couple of times in the past) or add in new feed formats (like when I added RDF and Atom alongside my default RSS 2.0). It’s my site, so I should be able to. But I can’t.

I’ve written some new blog software (you’re soaking in it), mainly for fun, and I wanted to deploy it. But what about my existing blog? It has less than 100 entries, but some of my older ones still receive a few hundred hits a month. We’re not talking about Yahoo.com here, but I don’t want to inconvinience those folks. More to the point: I know, and I warn customers, that Cool URIs Don’t Change. So what are my options?

  • Break the URIs, put in a 404 page to point people in the right direction, and eat humble pie regarding Cool URIs.
  • Leave the old, blosxom powered, blog up there, use a new URL for my new site, and put a prominent posting at the top saying that I’ve moved.
  • Port all of my entries to my new weblog, and use mod_rewrite to fix up incoming links.

I’ve decided to go with door #3 and port over my entries. It beats leaving a bunch of content up on software I’m disinclined to support, and it keeps everything in one place. Of course, I haven’t actually done it yet- this is the only entry here at the moment- because it’s going to take a while, and I don’t want to delay launching my new weblog, which I’ve written in all of one day (a day in which I also fitted in 5 hours of D&D).