Blogger: Redirect to Preserve URL's

One of my pet peeves is broken links and it is an easy consequence of moving between blogging platforms. For example, WordPress and Google Sites are all about directory-based URL's (/2010/04/16/title) whereas Blogger goes for the traditional HTML page (/2010/04/title.html) and none I have found provide redirection to preserve these differences after migrating. It isn't, however, impossible if you're using Blogger because of their "Missing Files Host" feature.

First, though, you'll need to be able to create your own redirector elsewhere on a more supportive web host. For my test I made a simple one hosted on MediaTemple using a single .htaccess file. I set my missing files host to find.gibdon.com and pointed that sub-domain to the MediaTemple redirect script I created. The contents of this is merely a translation from a HTML page name to a label search:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

# redirector script for find.gibdon.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \.gibdon\.com$
RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9]+).html$ http://www.gibdon.com/search?label=$1 [L,QSA]

What this will do is translate any alphanumeric page name like videos.html into a label search on my blog. Thus, when you visit http://www.gibdon.com/video.html Blogger will issue a 302 redirect to the same URL on find.gibdon.com. The hypertext access file there will then match the one regular expression I have there and tell the browser to go http://www.gibdon.com/search?label=video.

There is a speed penalty to the user since their browser will be forced to connect to a separate server, but any links pointing to the URL's can be preserved and that's worth it in the end.

Two oddities I encountered while messing with this:

1. wget -S --spider doesn't always show the Location header for some reason.
2. eNom's free redirector (e.g. "WWW Redirect" option in Host Records) will redirect the browser to a special URL first to count that client's particular request, probably for analytics. This is annoying and can be slow, but that's what you get for free.