Moving posts in Jekyll

I just launched this new blog and immediatly made a huge mistake: I typo'ed the date for the first post … and every subsiquent date thereafter.

This created an interesting problem … I had already shared the link to those posts and Google had already indexed it. With a statically built site, how can I move the posts, but redirect the old url to the new location?

I added this to my _includes/head.html file (just above the </head>):

{% unless page.new_location == blank %} <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url={{ page.new_location }}"> <link rel="canonical" href="{{ page.new_location }}" /> {% endunless %}

Then, created this new _layouts/moved.html file:

--- layout: default --- <header class="post-header"> <h1 class="post-title">Moved</h1> </header> The content you're looking for has been moved to <a href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ page.new_location }}">{{ page.new_location }}</a>.

Now, I can create new pages (I can't create posts, because they will be listed in the index page .. so, posts win here) that look similar to this:

The end result is a surprisingly flexible way to redirect users (and inform search engines) to relocated content.

Update: It was pointed out to me (by @iamcarrico on the Jekyll IRC Channel) that there is a plugin created by the Jekyll team that handles redirects that's far simplier and easier to use. However, I'm going to continue using my thing, only because I show a pretty screen if the redirect doesn't happen.