A number of people have mentioned that they’re been getting 404 messages lately when trying to follow internal links here to older posts on the blog or older comments. I think – I hope! – that won’t be happening anymore.

The problem began when, in my efforts to get to the bottom of the “too many requests” timeouts that happen every now and then here, I phoned my host. Each time I phoned – and there were many times – there was a different person helping me, and each time that person made a new and different suggestion for a fix. Sometimes that person even did whatever he or she was suggesting rather than asking me to do it. Not a single one of these things has helped the “too many requests” problem, although in the last week or so the problem has improved (knock wood).

One of the things they insisted would help would be if they updated the PHP. This made me wary; I’d been told it can cause problems. But they insisted that if it caused problems, the PHP version could be changed back again. That sounded reasonable to me.

After that I started noticing that old internal links back to blog posts or comments here no longer worked. Wonderful. It took me quite a bit of sleuthing to understand what had happened, but apparently the format of permalinks for the blog had changed. In the 22,000+ posts I’ve written, I’ve got thousands of old links like that, and there was no way I was going to change them back by hand. As you may have already guessed, switching back to the earlier PHP version didn’t help. Plus, there was a big warning on WordPress saying it’s dangerous to change the permalink settings on a live blog.

And so I was wary of changing the setting back to what I thought it had originally been. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was probably the only solution. So late last night I did it – and voila! All the links now seem to work – even the new ones, post-PHP change. I thought I’d have to switch them back by hand. But for whatever reason, the blog seems to be able to “read” them properly and do a redirect to the proper post. It does the same thing for the newer links comments.

Let me know if you’re getting any 404 messages here in the future. It shouldn’t be happening. Of course, it still might happen for old external links. But not for links back to something on this blog.