937 posts; 2380 comments. Seriously guys, thanks. Here’s to a thousand more – and a thousand more after that!

Thing is, along the way I’ve managed to spend an awful lot of time fiddling and toying about with the site and with WordPress (the software that makes it work); adding plugins, removing plugins, altering themes, changing markup systems, moving databases. You pick up cruft along the way. Things install themselves and then don’t uninstall again. Bits of code add tables to the database and leave bits of data there even after the code is long gone and forgotten. Bloat sets in.

It all adds up. In the case of this blog it adds up to a database that’s pushing 40MBs, and that’s just woefully unnecessary. What’s more, I’m fairly certain that this cruft is part of the reason the site gets so slow at times. So, I’ve decided to do something about it. That something is to create The Sharpe’s Opinion Archive – where old blog posts go to be remembered fondly.

Which is to say, I’ve hidden all the old stuff under a mattress.

Actually that’s misleading. Really what I’ve done is create a brand shiny new blog (the one you are reading now) with none of the cruft, and moved the old one, in its entirety, to archive.sharpesopinion.co.uk. To aid the transition I’ve also added a few rather marvellous lines of code to my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/200[8|9]/? [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-content/uploads/200[8|9]/?
RewriteRule (.*) http://archive.sharpesopinion.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Now, if you understand those you’ll see that what it’s doing is redirecting any requests for posts in 2009 and 2008 to the equivalent page on archive.sharpesopinion.co.uk. In other words, any links to pre-2010 posts at sharpesopinion should automagically redirect to the archive site, as will requests for image files. But don’t bother trying to go to the front page of archive.sharpesopinion.co.uk, because THAT redirects to the front page of this blog.

Confused? Don’t worry about it. Point is, it works.

Hopefully, this will the site will run a little faster – at the very least the archive page should load quicker (because it’s not having to do anywhere near as much work). There’s probably easier ways than this to start a blog over, but hopefully this way there’s decent enough continuity across the two sites, I haven’t lost any posts or broken any links, and I’ve got a nice fresh WordPress install to use. Best thing of all – all my unfinished drafts, those posts I started but couldn’t never bring myself to finish – have simply vanished! The only thing that’s really broken is the Search, which can now only search one site at a time – either posts before this month or posts after this month. But none of you use the search box anyway, so I’m not too beat up about that really (Cue record number of hits on the search results page…).

So, as I said at the top, here’s to a thousand more posts! I suppose I had better start writing some of them. Come back later for some links…