For my money, WordPress 2.5 is the best WP version yet. [Yes, one hopes that software would get better as it matures; this is not, of course, always the case.] A lot of the things that can be automated have been, and the UI has been thoughtfully re-designed. As always, there are some small things that bug me, but I’m gonna see if those complaints hold up over time.

I’m hoping that having a new toy to play with is going to cause me to write more. I’m about ready to write about some of the things I haven’t been writing about lately, but I guess I need to hold off a bit more. Anyway… thanks to the WP guys. [And yes, I waited to post this until all the WP installs that I control on the box were upgraded. I think the count's now about 85. Yeesh.]

A few things have been going on behind the scenes:

1. I’ve been categorizing the As-Yet Unfiled Entries over the last month. I’ll finish next week. I finally made it happen by just putting a recurring task in Tasks Pro to do 15 a day. I started with 450+ and am now down to 90. 29 Jan: DONE!
2. I killed the nested categories today. Took a lot of SQL to map nested categories back to their parents, then create tags with WP’s category-to-tag converter. Sucked having to do that by hand, though. One would think that the category-to-tag importer would have an option for doing just that in the conversion; most people that had nested categories, like me, would probably go to the device of parent category as category, child categories as tags. Meh.
3. I’ve been moving some stuff over from GFMorris.com. That took more SQL-fu, but I finally had an a-ha moment with joins today. I mean, I generated a working join on my own. It was a nice moment to understand WTF the syntax was doing for once.

Been a good thing to occupy time during conference calls today…

The rule of any long-running Web site is simple: content moves and old links break as a result. [caedmonscall.net] has been up and running since September 2001; it was, for its first few years, a hand-rolled site. Over the last year or two, we’ve transitioned it to WordPress, and things have been great. That said, doing that broke a lot of links, and until lately, I haven’t had a toolset for fixing those links easily. But here’s what I’m now using, WP plugin-wise, to fix the broken things:

• Alex King’s 404 Notifier. I snarf the RSS feed, and that reminds me that I have new things to go off and fix. [Guilt is good.]
• Google XML Sitemaps. A lot of the 404s I see are from Google and Yahoo! crawling the site looking for links that once were good. Might as well let the search bots know where things really are, no?
• Redirection, which is the true star of the show. John Godley’s plugin is ridiculously powerful—regular expressions for moving an entire directory elsewhere, 410 reporting for links you’ve purposefully ended, the ability to create 301s on the fly when you change a post slug, you name it. I can’t say enough about the awesomeness of this plugin.

If you’re taking an existing site into WordPress and want to re-point things, or if you’re looking to reorganize your WP site, these tools will help you keep the Web from being broken. That’s a good thing.