What can I say, upkeep sucks. I had made a number of changes as I migrated this blog from one platform to another. After the migrations, I even made some changes to WordPress. After making all of those changes, everything was broken but it didn’t matter. I had lots of leftover static content that allowed the broken links to function or so I thought.
After making my blog searchable, I had a friend of mine reach out, David, reached out to let me know that I had some broken links. I didn’t think too much of it until I realized what all was broken.
Broken Links
I originally thought that the fix was simple. I noticed that many of my URLs were pointing to https://live-blog.shellnetsecurity.com ( I am not linking to this because it’s dead site ). At one point while I was trying to implement Simply Static Pro, I had changed my site to live-blog. I did this so I could run the live site internally and maintain my original blog.shellnetsecurity.com site. This was a bad idea because it didn’t work.
The nice thing about having my entire site run from a Github Repo is that I could easily find all of these bad links. I was able to grep through the repo and find any articles that had the live reference. The really nice thing is that I also figured out why images weren’t loading on some of my posts! It turns out that some of those images were also referencing the live URL. Bonus!
After going through and changing everything from live-blog to just blog, I found the next hurdle. Now I had a bunch of 403 errors coming back for URLs.
Access Denied: 403 Errors
At some point in my conversion to a static site, I also changed my permalinks. I originally used the WordPress Month and name format:
https://blog.shellnetsecurity.com/2023/02/sample-post/After running that format for awhile, I changed to a Custom Structure of:
https://blog.shellnetsecurity.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/Initially, this was not a problem because I had these old links in my static repo. One of my upkeep tasks was to remove all of the stale content. This ended up breaking some of the content a little because it required you to enter index.html to reach the old links. The only problem is that my links didn’t reference the index.html pages.
In addition to these, I had so incorrect links to WordPress preview URLs like this:
https://blog.shellnetsecurity.com/?p=123These URLs are not available in the static site and return 403s as well. These also took longer to correct. I needed to manually skim my articles and make these corrections.
Missing Domain Content
While doing all of this and working on my Using Nanobus to Replace Nginx article, I also found that my content.shellnetsecurity.com domain was not serving content. I decided to correct that one as part of my work as well.
Conclusion
Yes, upkeep sucks. This was quite a few minutes of my time spent on a Friday night. The good news is that it needed done and the site is working better now. Thanks David! Maybe I’ll try to add comments again some time in the future….