Some of you might have noticed that I had to basically re-publish my article earlier on the NASA film “Skylab – The First 40 Days.” This was due to WordPress, the blogging software used on Xadara, being a bit of a pain in the ass due to me having to edit a few things around.
What I discovered at the end of me writing that article was that back in November I had already written an article on that video, and thus already had an article with the intended title of the new one.
What did I go and do? Simple. I changed the title of the old article, and appended the URL with “old-article” tacked on to signify it was the old one, and I set the new one with the old ones name.
Normally, WordPress doesn’t have an issue with these kinds of changes, or so I though. Instead, the end result was that my new social media posts were redirecting people to the old, changed article! The old article “kept” the original URL, which I new was something WordPress did, but I didn’t know it was still redirecting even if the old article has its URL taken over by a new article!
This change seemed to stay constant, too – making any URL name changes to my new article still redirected it to the old one! Not even deleting the old article changed anything – the new article’s URL now just redirected to a dead page! The only thing I could do to fix the issue was to delete the new article, re-create it, and give it a completely new, unique URL, while also, for sanity’s sake, fixing the original articles URL, restoring it to the original form.
So, yeah, that was all a mess and has me kind of ticked off today. Granted, I should be a bit more careful in my planning, but these things are bound to happen with the kinds of random NASA videos I cover. Perhaps if I had done the article differently this wouldn’t have been an issue to begin with, but, well, whatever. It’s a learning experience.
This also probably would not have been an issue had I used dates in my article URL’s, which is something I intend to enable soon, and should have easily over a year ago.
Ah well, we’ll see what happens.