For reasons to be seen soon, I am tending to some domain cleanup. Okay, I am moving this blog from shared Reclaim hosting to their cloud hosting. Over 20+ years with this tank/barge a lot of stuff has piled up that can be better left in a quieter corner.
Mainly it’s because for at least the first half or more of the run, I pretty much was a one site domain, primarily, and still despite declining popularity, the main blog here is WordPress. I learned early on though, I could still stash stand alone web content into other directories parallel to the WordPress stuff. Those URLs would get “served” before WordPress took a sniff.
Much was in a directory I so cleverly called “stuff” where I would hang subdirectories for small experiments, or web files for talks/presentations when I did that sort of stuff (get it? stuff). And I had a static HTML archiver of the first blog years (2003-2005) that were once powered by something called MovableType.
For a while I have been archiving sites that have either been closed on me externally, e.g. ones that have bitten the web dust (e.g. Wikispaces, Storify, my entire Maricopa web history). Oh heck it’s worth spinning the old jukebox, cause I can
Plus I have a few domains of my own that I have let lapse, but just moved to keep at least some remnants of their former overly estimated self importance, like 106tricks.net or dontlookatmy.photos.
I keep these in a subdomain I refer to my “Pile of Old Web Bones” at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/
For the four or five left who rummage around cpanel (which maybe itself going the wayside), I moved the files in one swoop with the File Manager and then set up web redirects. I did work through one issue- When cpanel adds the redirects as directives to the cogdogblog.com root directory .htaccess file it put them below the WordPress directives. This meant WordPress got its hands first on my links and tried to server something up.
I merely had to move the web redirect commands above the WordPress ones.
Who around here even mucks in their .htaccess files?
What it means though is I am not breaking any links to old stuff. Any URL that went to the old directories or within now automatically go to the new ones.
So…
- https://cogdogblog.com/stuff redirects to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/stuff That is now just a directory listing of much “stuff” I barely remember, it’s a real dump of web cruft, but the links stay alive, e.g. https://cogdogblog.com/stuff/kuvillage10/
- https://cogdogblog.com/alan redirects to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/alan The static HTML archive of CogDogBlog 2003-2005 the MovableType era
- https://cogdogblog.com/storybox redirects to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/storybox The 2012-2014 adventures with the “internet in a box” an experiment I carried around as an implementation of the Piratebox.
Moving these and deleting a few old log files freed up like 4 Gb of space, and this is “stuff” that does not need to hang in the cloud.
Archiving and keeping links alive is a core value around these here parts, even if never noticed. It’s mucky work but rewarding.
Featured Image: Mine. Yep. I Want a Muck Truck flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
DWCGD. I was mucking around with my domains just last week, after moving from Reclaim Hosting’s shared environment (which is awesome) to a local hosting provider (for reasons that have nothing to do with the awesome people at Reclaim!). And I decided to collapse a separate domain for my dissertation into a subdirectory of my main blog/site and set up a domain redirect. CPanel, SSH, and, surprisingly, Claude to help make sure I got the .htaccess syntax right.
Yeah htaccess always feels like voodoo. I usually have to tweak to get the pattern match right. I try to keep a local copy, have seen some times where hosting resets them.
Whatever it takes To Serve Web
.htaccess rules are always a bit tricky but we use this tool internally a lot at Reclaim to help test:
https://htaccess.madewithlove.com/