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Internet Technology Bleg

September 3, 2007, 10:24 pm

Back in 2003 when I set up this blog, I knew less than nothing about how to do it.  I mostly did things in a way I am still happy with, but I made one mistake.  In setting up the domain mapping from CoyoteBlog.com to Typepad, I mapped CoyoteBlog.com to my entire Typepad account, not just this blog.  As a result, my permalinks take the form of www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/blahblah.html rather than www.coyoteblog.com/blahblah. 

I now know how to fix it, but when the site republishes, I am pretty sure that anyone who has ever linked to a permalink on the site will get an error, because they will be remapped to the shorter address in the www rather than the /coyote_blog domain.  My question is this, if I access to all the A and MX and CNAME etc. records for CoyoteBlog, is there some way to calls the the www.CoyoteBlog.com/Coyote_blog/ domain to www.CoyoteBlog.com/ ?  If I can do this, I *think* my old permalinks will work.  Maybe. 

I probably will be too scared to try this, unless I can get a good solution for this problem

Tags:
Category: Blogging, Computers & the Internet

6 Comments

  1. eddie:

    There's nothing you can do with DNS records to change this. "www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog" is not a domain. It's a URL. The domain is the part before the slash. No matter what comes after the slash, it's all the same domain.

    What you need is something on your web server that can either alias or redirect URLs, so that a URL of the form "www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/whatever" is either aliased to or redirected to the URL "www.coyoteblog.com/whatever". You do this on your webserver, not through your DNS records (i.e. A and MX and CNAME are of no help to you here at all).

    The problem, of course, is that your web server is not yours but TypePad's, and you have only a small degree of control over how it is configured. I don't use TypePad so I can't tell you whether or how what you're asking for can be done. It would be easy on your own webserver; it would be easy for TypePad to do; it may be impossible for you to get TypePad to do it.

    September 3, 2007, 11:43 pm

  2. ErikTheRed:

    Agreed... pretty tough unless you have control over the box... then it's just some simple (heh heh) URL rewriting on Apache, or sitting back and wishing you were running Apache if you're on IIS. Which begs the question - why change everything? If it ain't broke (and just a little messy)...

    September 4, 2007, 1:07 am

  3. Paul:

    The other comments are correct. You need to do this on the server. So unless you move off typepad you are not going to have much luck.

    The first thing which came to mind was symbolic links, however this is a unix/linux feature. You would simply create a symbolic link for each old coyote_blog/whatever to whatever, in the end the content is html files in one location and no broken links. There are probably ways within the webserver to map this as well.

    September 4, 2007, 1:14 am

  4. Peter:

    Move to WordPress -> http://adamstiles.com/2005/10/painless_switch_from_typepad_to_wordpress/

    You can have a corner on my server. :-)

    September 4, 2007, 3:10 am

  5. TJIC:

    What Eddie and Erik said: you need to use domain rewriting tools. Pretty easy if you're running apache on your own box. If not, then you need to beg the entity that hosts your site to do it.

    September 4, 2007, 5:27 am

  6. Kim Scarborough:

    I see your server is running Apache, so it shouldn't be too much trouble. Just have your host put this line in the httpd.conf file:

    RedirectMatch permanent ^/coyote_blog/(.*) https://coyoteblog.com/$1

    Feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have questions.

    September 4, 2007, 6:04 am