Yesterday I published a blog post–the first non-hello-world one on my new blog. Before doing so I had tried to get pretty permalinks working (it’s a WordPress site). They didn’t seem to work, probably because I put an nginx rule in the wrong config file… but anyway, they didn’t work.
So yesterday’s post went out to the world with an ugly permalink:davidablack.net/blog?p=33. I was very happy with the response to the post, but not with the ugly permalink. I didn’t like the /blog part (the host should be blog.davidablack.net) and I didn’t like the uninformative query string.
Today I fixed it, and with little or no down time.
It was easy to change the root address and type of permalink in WordPress. Trickier was grandfathering in poor ol’ ?p=33.
I did it by putting a rewrite rule in the nginx config file for davidablack.net (which is also a WordPress site). The rule is in the /blog location block, and looks like this:
if ($query_string ~ "p=33") {
rewrite ^(.*)$ http://blog.davidablack.net/2016/08/17/a-log-reflector-for-aws-lambda/ last;
}
(Except it’s probably word-wrapping on your screen: everything from “rewrite” to “last;” should be on one line.)
So yesterday’s link still works, and so does today’s nicer one. Cool.