Asterisk Refreshed and Reloaded

A few goals to begin with

As you may know I like to break my goals into three categories. If you don’t know — read “Focus on Goals.”

Organizational goals:

• Clean up server
• Better organize files and directory structure
• Make updates easier to make
• Future proof
• Easier (less time) to maintain
• Less spam

Business goals

• Redefine brand (phase two)
• Easier (less time) to maintain

User goals

• Fix what’s broken (comments)
• Add more rich functionality (link to comments, better search and error messages)
• Pave the way for future improvements

I got these goals from various feedback I’ve received over the last year or so. They’re pretty straightforward but do present some challenges.

Challenges

• Orphan URLS
• Loss of functionality
• Might drop something users want
• Loss of Traffic
• Google taking awhile to index new structure
• 7nights domain

Ok, so now you know the goals and challenges I began with, you might be wondering what I’ve done, what’s new and what might be coming down the road.

New Host

I took my goals and made a little plan. It began with seeking out a new host. I solicited advice awhile back and talked to some friends. I got lots of good recommendations but in the end Mike Davidson sold me on Dreamhost. So far I’ve been very happy. The transition from their end was pretty smooth, and I noticed some immediate improvements in my site — which I’ll detail a bit later.

New CMS

Well, not really. After much advice, discussion and thought I decided to simply upgrade to MT 3 for now. I’m going to readdress the issue in a few months. I’m really impressed with Wordpress, but this decision simply came down to the fact that I know MT very, very well. The transition was fairly smooth, and for the most part I’m very happy I decided to go this route.

Future- and Past-Proofing My URLS

I’m “protecting” my old, legacy URLS using a modification of a technique I found here. What I do is write a custom .htaccess file into my “/archives” folder with MT, like this:

RewriteEngine On

<MTEntries sort_order=”ascend” last_n=”300000”>

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} <$MTEntryTitle dirifyplus=”plu”�$>.php$

RewriteRule .* <$MTEntryLink regex=”stripFile”$> [R,L]

</MTEntries>

This insures all my old links will be redirected to the new entry locations. I only build this once, as it’s not needed for my new entries. Speaking of which, there is a new URL scheme for those as well.

With much help from Mike and a detailed post from Már Örlygsson I’ve future-proofed and “un-crufted” my URLs.

So, what else is new?

In the process I’ve been able to make a few very nice improvements to the site. Some benefit me, some should benefit you and some will benefit everyone involved! Want a list? Here it go:

• I’m now writing the XML that runs my SOW with Movable Type. Saves me having to get in there and edit the file every time, now the values come straight from the SOW entry.
• The comments script is much, much faster (so far) and it looks like the lag is gone.
• You can link to individual comments now.
• The comment cookie is fixed.
• My site has been reorganized and cleaned up for easier maintenance.
• I’m making use of article summaries now. We’ll see how that goes…
• I’ve improved the search and added it to the homepage.
• I’ve moved my FAQs blog into Asterisk. You can still ask questions, only now it’s just a category, not a blog unto itself.
• I’ve re-organized my sidebar a bit based on user feedback.
• I’ve pulled the articles from my old dkrproductions.com site into Asterisk and created categories for them. I plan to “republish” them as I’ve got time.

And, last, but not least, I’ve updated my .

I hope these changes don’t cause to many problems and you’ll find them helpful in the future. In the coming months I plan on more changes and hopefully improvements. As, always, feel free to comment or with any feedback you have.