Thursday, May 03, 2007
Fixing code
I fixed the small problem in the code and I see that it's behaving itself.
Good.
I also spent some time making sure the codebase on the development server and the webserver were in sync (good thing because they weren't), cleaning up the code (getting rid of code that isn't used) and making sure it's still portable (by compiling it under Mac OS-X).
I also started to address some issues I have with internal duplicate content, which are two different pages having the same content.
Boy, do I have that in spades.
For instance, the link to todays page is http://boston.conman.org/2007/05/03.1 (note the leading zeros) but the link http://boston.conman.org/2007/5/3.1 will also work (note the lack of leading zeros). Google says it doesn't matter, but for me, it's an issue of aesthetics, and I would prefer the former style (with the leading zeros) over the latter (sans leading zero, and yes, mod_blog doesn't always generate links like I want it to). I added code to detect the non-leading zero references (which I didn't do) but was amused to find that I had code to detect some other variations (which aren't used that much, if at all) that's been there probably from the beginning (late 1999).
So I was aware of the issue seven years ago (imagine that!) but didn't finish that particular feature (since getting it running was more of a priority than getting all the fiddly bits right). I suspect I didn't finish it because handling the generalized case will take a bit more code than I expected, in order to generate redirects to a “canonical” URL.
