I took a few minutes to look through comments waiting for moderation this morning, especially those that Akismet marked as spam. After moderation, I went to view the post on the page to see that I did not de-spam a really spammy comment or anything. At that point, I realized that I had completely typo’d the title of a post yesterday regarding MarketLeverage. Cripes! Worse yet, that led to a typo in the URL. MarketLeverage became MarketLeveral.

I was not interested in changing the URL in the off-chance that it actually had generated a link. I actually have a redirection plug-in installed on this blog so that I can handle affiliate offers when I do include them in a post. And while it may have been an obvious solution to most readers, it did not click for me until that point… use the redirection script to handle redirecting the misspelled URL to the new, correctly spelled URL and post.

It is a simple plug-in to use. You bring up the redirection screen from “Manage” -> “Redirection” (obviously once the plug-in is installed. Type in the mis-spelled url (/2008/05/06/my-marketleveral-publisher-signup/), then type in the location to redirect to (http://www.esoomllub.com/2008/05/06/my-marketleverage-publisher-signup/), save it, and all works great.

Another really cool benefit of this plug-in is that you can actually keep track of the number of clicks each redirect gets. Awesome.

Interesting fact… in the short time since I put this redirect in place, maybe 15 minutes, there have already been 3 hits on the old URL that were redirected to the new URL.

PS RTFM

It seems that if I had taken the time to really dig in to this plug-in I would have noticed that there is an option in the plug-in to auto-add a 301 for posts that have the slug change. So, my instructions above are not to click this option on, and not even worry about changed URL’s in the future.