Erik J. Barzeski did a complete site reorganization and is asking:

If you’ve linked to me previously, or I’ve sent you a TrackBack, please search your site for links to mine and update them.…

Unfortunately, I don’t know what the etiquette is. People have links to my articles. Even I have links to my articles. “PermaLinks” are not very permanent. I don’t want to ruin the links other people have coded up, but I have to do something.

What should I do? Please let me know.

Erik, I’m not sure what resources other weblogging software has, but in my case, I’d have to hand-update every link. I’ll do it if necessary, but this will change the timestamp and make a “recently edited” message to appear in every such post… rather awkward.

My suggestion is: drop that funny 404 message you have now, and put a PHP script in its place. See this article for details.

In the script, set up an array associating the number in the /archives/000xxx.php with your new URL. This may be a hassle, but you only have to do it once – chances are, you already have this in some format. Then have the script return a “301 – Moved Permanently” response containing the new URL.

And you can even return the funny message if the 404 doesn’t refer to /archives… if you’d like some help with this, drop me a line. 🙂

Update: it turns out Erik’s a PHP wizard and no, he doesn’t have the old-to-new URL table. So I went back and changed the 4 or 5 links I had to his site.