I finally decided to change my permalinks to more standard types, such as http://www.thepiratescove.us/2008/04/01/retro-pirates-cove-moonbat-underwear/ versus the old type http://www.thepiratescove.us/?p=5434. Much better for search engines and when linking to other sites.
In order to accomplish this and still have all the old links to other sites and throughout the Interwebz, I am using a plugin called Permalinks Move Permanently. What this does
Right before the old permalink generates a 404, this simple plugin grabs the slug from the end of the request and checks if there’s a post with this slug living somewhere else on your blog. If so, it will generate a “301 Moved Permanently” error, and forward your user to the new location of your post. It’s simple, but effective.
I initially tried changing the permalinks with my test site, and, instead of 404′s, I was getting 500 errors. With the plugin, it redirected to the correct posts. Cool!
Looks good. It should have worked without the plugin. When I changed to pretty permalinks, all the old links still went to the right spot.
Afternoon, Steveegg. Yup, should work, but, have read about too many problems, the basic being that you would be forwarded to the home page.
With 2.5, seems just end up at a 500
It must be a 2.5 thing. I did my switch back in 2.2 (I think).
Could be. I turned the plugin off, and the redirects seem to be working. I plan on upgrading to 2.5 Thursday (though I may hold off with all the Dreamhost server issues), and will see if it still works.
It’s not a 2.5 thing. I set up a test blog to see what breaks (you’ll definitely want to update the captcha; WP-Polls also breaks), and the change from standard to pretty permalinks does not break the old links.
You are probably right. There were lots of server issues with Dreamhost yesterday (shocker!) that were probably causing it.
I do not particularly like the write post module in 2.5. Kinda clunky, especially with all that stuff way down, such as the trackbacks box.