When I moved my blog from Moveable Type to WordPress, it broke all the permalinks, which mean any old incoming links end up at my 404 page.
Unfortunately I’d chosen an archive/URL structure in MT that’s impossible to reproduce in WordPress. I have generated a 1500 line text file that translates old URLs to new ones, which leads me to my techical question – will adding 1500 lines to my .htaccess file put a heavy load on the server and slow my site down?
Tim,
I wouldn’t be too worried about a .htaccess file with 1500 lines in it, that’s not a big .htaccess file in the slightest, unless your web server is a VIC-20 or ZX81. I’ve seen busy servers with 30Kb .htaccess files, with no appreciable drop in performance, but it does all depend on the meatiness of your web server, popularity of your site etc.
I’ve got a 500-line one on one of my sites (chiefly denial to bad bots and the odd comment spammer). You’re more likely to run into performance issues if you have multi-level htaccess stuff enabled, but even then, it generally isn’t an issue until you get slashdotted.
Now, if it’s better suited to mod_rewrite, you might look at that.
Can’t use mod_rewrite. The old URLs were based on MT’s message IDs, which got lost in the translation, so it’s impossible to generate them on the fly without referring back to the MT database. My URL structure was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but came back to bite me (as these things do)
I’ve done it. Seems to work