Squarespace: Wizardry of Merlin Mann

I have been struggling for four or five weeks with Squarespace 6, the new platform for Macfilos. And, I mean struggle. Thanks to Merlin Mann, though, I am beginning to get to grips with laying out a post and using all the great widgets, or blocks as we now call them.

I really love the potential of Squarespace 6. It is really powerful but takes some getting used to. The concepts are completely different from the old SS5 platform and this was a big surprise. I had expected more commonality.

The changeover has not been without challenges and problems. The biggest disaster I face is broken links. In my Squarespace 5 days my post URLs started with macfilos.com/home followed by the date and the post title. This is what Google and other search engines have stored over the past four years.

Home sweet home

I duly created a replica Home page in Squarespace 6 but hadn’t reckoned with the new system’s innate cleverness. Too clever by half, as it turns out. Once I had set this Home page as the system HOME all the URLs in the site have been stripped of the /home after macfilos.com.

The result of this is that Google cannot find any articles written before the date of the changeover. Instead, visitors end up at the current home page and not at the specific article.

In short, we are in a bit of a mess and Squarespace is trying to resolve the issue. I understand Macfilos is not the only site callenged in this way. To complicate matters, all articles written after the changeover are stored on Google in the format macfilos.com+date+title, so any future fix is going to have to be a pretty clever one.

I can only apologise again if you have searched on Google and ended up here rather than at the page you wanted. In the sidebar to the left I suggest a way round it, but I hope it is only temporarily fix.

by Mike Evans, 28 August 2012

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