Some of you may have noticed how truly sluggish the site has become of late. Well, we did a little digging and discovered that, through a data processing error, the system was generating multiple URL aliases for every single page on the site.

Now, with over 800 posts on the site already, it was a bit too much to go through and pick and choose which alias to keep for each post ... so we just deleted all of the aliases.

What this means is that many existing links out there to a specific blog post or article here are now broken. Those pages still exist -- it's just that they're now filed under their default URLs. Making use of search (currently on the top-right of every page) can take you to the page you were trying to reach. (We also added a note to the 404 page itself.)

I know this isn't ideal, and I'm afraid how this will affect our search engine rankings. A plethora of suddenly-broken links won't look good to them. However, the Google sitemap is dynamically updated so that's one step in the right direction. And as we see persistent and repeated 404s for a given page in our logs, we'll manually catch ourselves up.

The hope is that this will greatly improve the responsiveness of mediagirl.org, and make it easier for people to visit and join in the discussions.

Thanks.