Hey, all. It’s been a long weekend with school work and a community garage sale. You know, the important things in life. Now it’s Monday and back to the grinding reality that we go to the office to earn a paycheck to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. *sigh*
Anyway, Friday I went to a seminar and hooked up my laptop to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and checked out my blogs. I saw some links coming back to my articles and clicked them, only to find a huge white page of black text with a bunch of indecipherable errors. I’m a geek. I can read most errors that my blog can spit out, but not this one.
I determined in short order that none of the actual post pages had valid URLs any more. The file structure of putting a category first followed by the post title was not legit. I had to update my blog’s internal permalink structure to get any page besides the home page to come up at all. Then people were presented with my Error 404 page, which I’ve since customized.
That wasn’t much of a problem on this blog, but on Gitr Knows WoW, that translates into 75% of a significant number of people getting an error page that pretty much called them stupid. I customized that page to list my top 12 articles that people search by and find the blog listed in the top 5 on Google searches. I’m recouping about 95% of those people to stay and get what they want, but traffic has dropped 50% because the pages are no longer indexed with as high of a Google rating because they are seen as new pages due to the new URLs.
Did anyone else with a WordPress self-hosted blog experience a similar permalink problem between Thursday night and Friday morning? I have GoDaddy, and until I hear otherwise, I’m going to blame the SQL server on the host for changing something. I’m still running WP 2.2.1 because of some category issues I had when I tried WP 2.3 two weeks ago.
