Permalinks, Alpha Flight, Rudy, insurance, and ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
So Neilalien had a short essay regarding Blogger’s dropping of FTP publishing, which, as you may recall, instigated my own switchover to the WordPress blogging platform. After reading what he had to say, I emailed Mr. Alien and talked over this situation, particularly in regards to “linkrot” (i.e. the breaking of links to my old Blogger permalinks, lost when I moved to WordPress). I was especially concerned since, not only did I break any incoming links from other sites, I had a habit of linking to past posts, so plenty of internal links were broken.
However, Neil suggested a solution which I’ve since implemented…republishing stripped down versions of my old archive pages through Blogger, containing all the old permalinks, which themselves include links back to the current version of my site. (I’ve also – hopefully – set those pages to not be indexed by search engines, so I shouldn’t have duplicate results on everything.) It’s not the most elegant solution in the world, but it’s better than people getting 404 errors all over the place. And I’m no longer breaking links in other people’s sites, which really did bother me.
From what I gather, if I’d been using Blogger’s “post-per-page” format instead of the “archive.html#4358435080490”-style permalinks, I wouldn’t be having this problem, as those appear to translate over a little easier. Or, at least, I’d be having different, more easily solvable problems. Unless there’s a solution I missed, which I’m sure I’ll hear about in the comments if I did.
Anyway, short version…old permalinks should go to something other than a 404 page now. Sorry for the inconvenience, and sorry for not being very considerate of you folks who suddenly found old links to my site suddenly not working. And now, I can put off trying to manually fix all my internal links, which would have probably driven me crazy when I hit this post.
A CAVEAT: at some point, I had an issue with some new update of Blogger or ‘nother, and my archive page URLs changed format. If you see links in earlier pages of mine to even older posts in this format:
“https://progressiveruin.com/archives/2004_04_25_archive.html#108291646897164207”
…you can remove the “archives/” directory, making the link this:
“https://progressiveruin.com/2004_04_25_archive.html#108291646897164207”
…which will work. I keep meaning to fix those, but, geez, who has the time?
Anyway, that’s a whole lot of “blogging about blogging,” for which I apologize. Thanks for your indulgence while I work out the kinks that still exist in my redesign.
Just so I have some comic book content today:
- Action Comics #1 sells for one million smackers. I wondered when this was going to happen. I think, a long time ago, back in my BBS days, I predicted in a comics forum that we’d see this happen by the year 2000. Hey, I was close.
- Friend of the site Tom Mason writes a bit about William Overgard, the cartoonist what brought us Rudy, and you know how much I like Rudy.
- Andrew has another Nobody’s Favorite, and she was borne of Bill Mantlo’s Alpha Flight. (By the way, for a while there, Alpha Flight, under both Byrne and Mantlo, was one of the just straight-up creepiest superhero comics ever. And I really do mean that in a good way.)
- I’ve unfortunately not been pointing out Dave’s recent series of posts discusssing the “Interplanetary Insurance” series from 1950s DC Comics. Yes, that would be tales of insurance sales and claims. With robots and aliens. In SPAAAAAAACE. This is both completely insane and completely awesome. Go, read.
How many people are going to walk into comic stores this week claiming they have a mint condition copy of that there million dollar comic they heard about? You know, this one. Or maybe this one with the cover ripped off…
From that article about Action #1,
“There are only about 100 copies of Action Comics No. 1 believed to be in existence”
That can’t be right?
I’ve been reading about all this from you and NeilAlien and everyone else and I still don’t understand what it means for my blog and whether or not I should do something about it.
And now, of course, we want you to tell us more about those Alpha Flight issues.
As for the Blogger mess, I’ve chosen to bury my head under the covers and hope that somehow, it will all work itself out.
Yes, please elaborate on the eeriness/creepiness of Byrne Alpha Flight.
Phil says: “From that article about Action #1, ‘There are only about 100 copies of Action Comics No. 1 believed to be in existence.’ That can’t be right?”
I won’t threadjack to link to myself, but I did an interview with J.C. Vaughn not too long ago (he’s the editor of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide). He broke down the numbers and said the following about Action #1:
“There are plenty of very rare comics with few known copies. The most attractive or best known of them, for very good reasons, is Action Comics #1. Aside from being the first appearance of the most widely recognized comic character in the world, it’s an issue of math. Roughly 200,000 copies were printed originally. Of those, about 130,000 sold and 70,000 were returned from the newsstands and destroyed. That was in a nation of roughly 130 million people. Now, in a nation of roughly 305 million people, we’d be lucky if there are 130 copies. A lot of people put the estimate under 100 copies, but personally I’ve always suspected just a few more than that, but we’re really splitting hairs there.” – J.C. Vaughn
I propose . . . ALPHA FLIGHT WEEK.
Make it so, Sterling. Make it so.
I second the motion.
Actually I recently reread my copies from the 80s for the first time since the 80s and kinda dug them for all their faults (eg. the endless exposition). I didn’t mind the Bill Mantlo era and I actually appreciated Gerry Talaloc’s inks a whole lot more.
Michael P. – If you’re using a Blogspot account, you don’t need to worry about it. It’s just folks what used the FTP function to send the actual blog files to our own domain spaces who are getting the short end of the stick here.
[…] a little bit…mostly more tinkering with some of the pages here as a result of all that stuff I blathered on about yesterday. But I’ve got things in the hopper, like an End of Civilization post, and other goodies, so […]
Tom K Mason- Thanks! I guess it makes sense when you break it down.
[…] I appreciate Neilalien. I’ve thanked him in my anniversary posts, I’ve thanked him for helping me hash out my website issues, and I don’t remember if I ever thanked him for, very early on, helping me […]