Oh, so you are the guy who has been causing all those 404s that I bump into.
And nice strawman, by the way. I have had some EXTREMELY popular blog posts that I bookmarked (remember NVIE’s post on git branching?) 404 just because the site changed architecture. (Now hosted on GitHub.) It’s all laziness and lack of forethought and planning. What is agile about one of the most popular blog posts in the development world 404ing?
That said, yes, it can be a bit time-consuming to map old URLs to new. I once started a project that would help considerably with this, but my employer at the time decided it wasn’t worth it (hey, would they see any more gold coins if they helped clients’ visitors’ bookmarks and search results work?). But a manual connection isn’t impossible. In some cases, it’s easy. When I moved off Drupal (damn it to hell), I redirected all those old /node/<id> URLs to their new ones. Because, damn it, I wasn’t going to add any 404s to the Internet if I could. I didn’t blog to make money. I blogged to help people. And maintaining URLs helps people.
And nice strawman, by the way. I have had some EXTREMELY popular blog posts that I bookmarked (remember NVIE’s post on git branching?) 404 just because the site changed architecture. (Now hosted on GitHub.) It’s all laziness and lack of forethought and planning. What is agile about one of the most popular blog posts in the development world 404ing?
That said, yes, it can be a bit time-consuming to map old URLs to new. I once started a project that would help considerably with this, but my employer at the time decided it wasn’t worth it (hey, would they see any more gold coins if they helped clients’ visitors’ bookmarks and search results work?). But a manual connection isn’t impossible. In some cases, it’s easy. When I moved off Drupal (damn it to hell), I redirected all those old /node/<id> URLs to their new ones. Because, damn it, I wasn’t going to add any 404s to the Internet if I could. I didn’t blog to make money. I blogged to help people. And maintaining URLs helps people.