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Blogging on Jekyll: URL Redirects

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About a month ago I migrated my blog from Tumblr to Octopress hosted on github-pages. I migrated because of Tumblr's slow page loads and frequent downtime. I picked Octopress because it is built on top of Jekyll, and it comes with a reasonable default stylesheet. Jekyll is a static site generator, which ensures I can deploy my blog on any old server in the future, and continue to use these same old tools (because I have them, rather than tumblr having them).

Migrating broke my URL Structure

Running my site through Google's Webmaster Tools showed that many sites are still linking to my old Tumblr blogpost urls. Tumblr's url structure is another reason I migrated away from it. I should be in full control of the urls on my blog. Never the less, I need to support redirects from the old URLs to my new URL structure /blog/:post_title.

However Jekyll is just a static site, so there's no ruby server to handle redirects. Other Jekyll users deploy to Heroku and use a small Sinatra app to handle redirects, but I feel like that is complicating my simple setup. If I were on a regular server I could setup an .htaccess file to handle the redirects, but github-pages does not support .htaccess.

Jekyll Plugins to the Rescue

One of the great things about Jekyll is its simple plugin system. On Jekyll's Wiki I found the Alias Generator. It allows you to specify aliases on a per blogpost basis, in the YAML front matter.

This post's YAML is:

---
layout: post
title: "Blogging on Jekyll: URL Redirects"
date: 2011-11-29 14:32
comments: true
categories: ["programming", "blogging"]
alias: [/blog/blogging-on-redirects]
---

Now when I rake generate my site, the Alias Generator will create another static html file for this post at /blog/blogging-on-redirects/index.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/blog/blogging-on-jekyll-url-redirects/" />
</head>
</html>

Which will redirect here. Try it: /blog/blogging-on-redirects

It was almost that simple. The Alias Generator actually broke when I provided some of my old Tumblr urls. However, I forked it here and fixed it so it handles nested aliases properly now. I also opened a pull request to the owner to get this change merged in.

Jekyll's Strengths

That experience is Jekyll's strength as a blogging platform. The output is so simple any web server can serve it so it doesn't matter where you deploy to. Its generation system is open source, hackable, and has a great plugin system.

But most importantly, even if the Jekyll project implodes tomorrow. I still have all my blog's content versioned, and have all the tools necessary to maintain my blog. I am not relying on a hosted service to back up my blog's content, or maintain the tools I edit it with.

Try Octopress

If you haven't tried Octopress yet, I highly recommend it. It's Jekyll based, but it has a decent default stylesheet, so it's very easy to install and immediately start blogging. No programming or tweaking CSS to get in the way of writing content.

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