rakaz

about standards, webdesign, usability and open source

Some updates…

Tuesday, 6 December 2005

I’m still working on the new look for rakaz.nl. It’s not finished yet, but I hope to finish it soon. In preparation of this change, I’ve already made some technical changes that I have been planning for a while.

First of all, I’ve dropped the www and removed the nucleus subdirectory. I’ve also created a simple new plugin for Nucleus that allows me to use friendlier URLs based on the title of the story. So http://www.rakaz.nl/nucleus/item/10 becomes http://rakaz.nl/item/firefox_wallpapers. All old URLs now permanently redirect to the new URLs.

Secondly, I’ve been working on a completely new anti-spam strategy for Nucleus 3.3 and I am testing it on this weblog. This means that from now on all comments on older stories will be moderated and all comments are checked for spam in a number of ways. Because the comments are moderated I’ve also removed the rel='nofollow' from links inside comments. More information can be found on the Nucleus forums:

All of the new Nucleus plugins are still in a testing phase, but as soon as they are ready for production use (perhaps even for Nucleus 3.2 using a compatibility layer) they will be officially released on this website, the nucleus plugin wiki and the forums.

5 Responses to “Some updates…”

  1. hcgtv wrote on December 11th, 2005 at 7:00 pm

    I’d be interested to know how you redirected the old urls to the new ones.

  2. rakaz wrote on December 12th, 2005 at 9:07 pm

    I use two methods at the same time. First I rewrite the URLs from the old nucleus directory to the root directory. At the same time I redirect to the new rakaz.nl domain. For example: http://www.rakaz.nl/nucleus/item/10 becomes http://rakaz.nl/item/10.

    The next step is provided by a plugin I wrote specifically for this task: NP_ForceFancy. This plugin detects if Nucleus is being called in using one of the old style URLs, builds a new URL and redirects to it.

  3. hcgtv wrote on December 13th, 2005 at 3:01 am

    Ok, I thought you were doing it all with mod_rewrite.

    I see how you’re doing it, but this forces you to always use NP_ForceFancy for the life of your blog since the search engines won’t update their links with a 301 redirect code.

    Thanks for the clarification.

  4. rakaz wrote on December 13th, 2005 at 11:16 am

    I think that 301 is the right redirect code. This is what the HTTP 1.1 specification says about it:

    The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible.

    So, search engines should update the URLs in their index with the new one.

  5. phil wrote on February 18th, 2006 at 6:22 pm

    Any chance of getting this plugin? NP_forcefancy? – i would love to rewrite my links instead of using the nasty ones i have now.

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