tl;dr
I’ve been making a lot of changes to the blog the past several months, all of which are in the background of what you experience. Most of what I’ve been doing is making the site easier for search engines to know what the content is.
However, one of things I’m doing is moving the blog aspect, or the information aspect of the site to the forefront. In doing that, I’m changing all of the link addresses. For 99% of my blog articles, the address was along the lines of blog.oilslickcoffee.com/yyyy/mm/dd/some title/. Now all links will be oilslickcoffee.com/some category/maybe a sub-category/some title/ (also dropping the ‘blog’ at the beginning of the address).
If you’re reading this, you’re already on the new site with new links. Feel free to look around. Finding everything you’re looking for is pretty much the same. The main navigation along the top has remained the same and internal links between pages and articles have been updated. Categories are a new thing here and you can see at the top of posts I have implemented breadcrumbs; the “HOME › BLOG › INFORMATIONAL” stuff you see under the article’s published date. Soon I’ll finalize the categories and create one page for you to view all categories.
Why the change
In the early days of blogs, it was considered best-practice to have the date an article was published in your link-address but that has changed and now search engines prefer a more human-readable, simple link-address. I’ve resisted the change because I have a lot of traffic coming in from external sites like forums that have links I can’t easily update.
But I’ve recently found a way to easily redirect traffic destined to those old links to the new ones. And while I can’t change most of the original links in forum posts made by other people, I can leave the redirects in place so that readers still reach the content they are looking for.
What this means for you
Hopefully the ride will be smooth and largely transparent to you. However, I may have missed a link or broken something somewhwere. If you find that’s the case and you can’t locate an article or piece of information on the site, contact me.
Timeline
I plan to start the heavy-lifting of the redirects around the second week of August, after my next training events. If you follow my RSS feed, the new feed link is https://oilslickcoffee.com/atom.xml.