Timeless permalink

Before this blog had the following URL structure /yyyy/mm/dd/sample-post/ ex: /2018/09/05/sample-post/  . Most online newspapers follow this URL structure. It’s great when the blog creates a lot content.

Over time, I figured out my posts still had visitors years after.  In terms of SEO, search engine may not  directly penalize in their algorithms but people will naturally look for content with a recent date.

More over, I often updated old posts . So I had to change the permalink structure.

I removed the date in the URL so the permalink changed from  /2018/09/05/sample-post to /sample-post

Someone liked your old post and shared the link . Now this link doesn’t work anymore , it is broken. You have to redirect the old URL to the new ones.

The redirection must be permanent , use the HTTP code 301 . A 302 is a temporary redirection. I use the plugin redirection .

You could redirect URL one by one, it will be time consuming. Better use a regular expression ( regex ) . Mine is

^/\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}/(.*)
/$1/

Yoast redirect tool  is a great tool to figure out the regex from your old permalink structure to the new one.

More tips from the expert

ICANN 60 day lock

My blog was down for the couple past days, because I changed the hoster.

Normally it should have been very smoothly. The domain was due to expired on July 1st 2017 . The support at FastComet told me to renew at Planethoster because they need 15 days to transfer. But I didn’t expect a 60 day lock after transferring my domain  raychenon.com to the new hoster.  Somehow the registrant’s information  (WHOIS ) was modified when I ordered the transfer not by me directly.

FastComet transferred the website content ( DB, images, post , …)  but the domain name was still with Planethoster. Since the transfer was in progress, I couldn’t edit the DNS, nameservers . But the support at Planethoster could. I was just the middle man between Planethoster and FastComet.  The fix took a week.

Currently the domain is still with Planethoster, but all the existing links are there.

To avoid the 60-day lock :

  • Request the transfer to another registrar before changing the registrant’s information
  • Have the prior registrant opt-out the 60-day lock (if this option is offered by the registrar) before making any change to registrant information.

In the next post, I will explain the reasons why I changed the Cloud Hosting for my blog powered by wordpress.

PlanetHoster tech support

Website hosting is a commodity, prices are dragged to the bottom. In terms of infrastructure and software, hosters are pretty much the same . Higher cost hosting providers have better customer support and extra service. That’s the general rule.

4 years ago, I chose a cheap hoster at ovh.com . I had trouble to set Domain Name System (DNS) . After a few days , no reply from customer support. So I invited a DevOps friend for pizza at home, after a few hours he couldn’t fix. The lunch cost more one year subscription. Then I reviewed on hostsearch and hostadvice . I tried out Planethoster during the free trial.

Customer Support

First I was impressed by how technical the support was. At any time of the day, within a few hours the technical support will reply to me. Just open a ticket on their website, you can reply to it by email like zendesk without being zendesk.

It wasn’t simple questions. They helped transfer my old wordpress to a new domain without breaking any link. Redirect to a sub-domain. Anonymize on whois.org …

Then the following years, I still stick to it.

Most hosters give incredible discount for the 1st year and increase dramatically the next year (Strategy of godaddy ) . But Planethoster stayed true to the initial price.

In addition, since the company is from Québec, Canada. The support speaks English and French.

CMS

Thanks to Cpanel , it is very easy to install in one-click WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Prestashop, WooCommerce, Magento. The updates are automatically taken care.

I’ve been a satisfied customer of Planethoster for over the past 3 years on multi hydrid now moving to Platform World ( 6 USD per month).

Disclaimer: I don’t advertise products I’ve never tried. The link below is an affiliate link. A percentage of the sale will go in my pocket. This commission comes at no additional cost to you

Eureka

Yeah I found it : yesterday I was looking for how to add tab on the upper page ( or tabbar) like on this blog

tabbar

Not sidebar, there is a plenty of non sense plugin, javascript and so which add your page on your side bar. The solution : in wp-admin Pages> add a new page. Of course depending on the theme you use, the theme must display it. Everything is in the theme.

I was nearly switching to Joomla to own the  tabbar. Now just one thing I still don’t know how to a post to under a certain page

Why use WordPress.com ?

If you have come to this page, maybe you’re interested in blogging, maybe you’re already using blogger or movable type. I used to have another account on WordPress until I could not log into when I was in China thanks to the Great Fire Wall. Then I switched to blogger which is convenient if you have a gmail address. But I was quite unsatisfied for various reasons :

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress has more advanced features. When it comes to SEO, meaning for search engine  wordpress blogs come first despite the fact blogger is owned by Google.  Believe it or not, here is a proof

wordpress.com | wordpress.org

Why not use a self-hosted from wordpress.org ? Some countries like China, Dubai block any access WordPress, Flickr , Youtube … So the best way to get around is self host or use a proxy. It’s affordable for about 4USD a month of hosting with domain name. Why do that when it’s available for free on wordpress.com PLUS you benefit the network of WP.com . Consider now you’ve blogged for some time and want to self host. Of course you don’t want to lose your posts and comments. It’s possible to transfer from wordpress.com, blogger, movable type to wordpress.org . So no worry

User friendly

Matt Mullenweg is cool and he’s just one day older than me 🙂 .  Actually I met him at WordCamp Paris, he is very candid, open and passionnate about what he does. I advise you watch any of his videos on youtube, he’s a visionnary at his age.  Coming from a non tech background, Matt’s visions of WordPress is very easy to use “You have to know WordPress is the last thing on Earth, bloggers have mind. It’s a disrespect towards the person if he loses time using it”. He openly described the software behind WordPress as clunky, there would be a lots of work to move to MVC. But hell, it’s better than TypePad and Blogspot. As users, we do not need to think about the tools when blogging we focus on contents. That’s the important part.

    I notice Google is losing edges. Flickr owned by Yahoo is cooler than piscasaweb. Since Youtube was bought, it’s less innovative. Blogspot was at the spot when Google bought it.

    So in short

    Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox
    Piscasaweb Flickr
    Jaiku Twitter
    Blogger WordPress

    Choose your side