I really should be studying for my finals tomorrow but I got distracted and clicked through a few of the more recently updated websites listed on the Sites page. I noticed that the Buccaneers, Babey! content column hadn’t been updated recently even though it is one of the most active blogs indexed by the NIC. I clicked on the link to buccaneers-babey.p101 which came out to be a dead link, so I immediately began investigating it. I got really worried that it had been removed, and I haven’t backed it up because it had been so active.
The first place I looked was in the error log I have that updates whenever the crawler runs into a problem. Up to this point I had never seen any errors recorded, but this was a good demo that it works. It looks like it has been happening April 30th.
I typed in “Buccaneers Babey!” into the Tumblr search bar and the first result was the answer to the issue. It turns out that the blog still exists and the author just changed the URL of the blog to better identify the page with her other social media accounts.
Crisis averted! But that still does not fix the fact buccaneers-babey.p101 goes to a site that doesn’t exist anymore. The fix to this problem is actually very simple: I just had to update the URL in a few places.
Database
sudo mysql use [database]; update sites set url="https://bowl-of-wyrms.tumblr.com" where new_domain="buccaneers-babey.p101";
It is important to have the where clause at the end of this statement or every single row in the database will have its URL set to the one specified.
Apache Virtual Host File
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available sudo vi buccaneers-babey.p101.conf
Apache Config File
cd /etc/apache2 sudo vi apache2.conf
A rule has to be added in the config file such that each site that contains the new URL still points to the proper p101 domain. Somewhere at the bottom of that file this line must be added:
ProxyHTMLURLMap https?://bowl-of-worms\.tumblr\.com/ http://buccaneers-babey.p101 Ri
This whole thing was a relatively easy fix that I was able to do in under an hour, but it goes to show just how fragile links between websites are. On websites that are not proxied through my little system, links to the old domain will forever be broken. Hopefully people will see .p101 domains as the solution to this problem, but widespread adoption of this site is a long way off, if ever.