Rourke McNamara

As part of a site overhaul, I moved from date-based permalinks to category-based permalinks. I did this to segment the site by top-level categories, and to improve search engine friendliness. Many people argue that this is a superior permalink structure, but very few point out the downsides.

Broken URLs are the single biggest problem. The initial change isn’t a big deal. I used Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration plugin to redirect all the old URLs to the appropriate new URLs. Watch out, though: whenever you change a category you will end up with a broken URL that’s the above plug-in does not fix. Also, if you change the name of one of your categories, all of the posts under that category will have changed URLs.

I wanted to like TextDrive. I really did. They have an active online community. They have an amazing range of services available so your hosting solution can easily grow with your needs. They’re endorsed by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, my experience with TextDrive was awful.