MT weirdness

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I am still tracking a weird behavior of MT that has been bugging me for months now. My weblog permalinks are setup to reflect the post main category and title like /category/post_title.html (in a classical web fashion of a typical old-fashioned webmaster, I can't stand cryptic URLs). Somehow, some entries are missing the category value and end up published at both /category/title... and //title... My web server root folder is full of these double, unwanted pages.

Following my previous post, which seems to have attracted some attention, Simon has referrer links displayed on this page that clearly shows people coming from http://www.padawan.info//trusted_comments.html (while the "normal" URL is http://www.padawan.info/web/trusted_comments.html).

I just recall that, as usual when I post from NetNewsWire and link to Joi Ito's weblog, the TrackBack autodiscovery will fail on Joi's site, which is notoriously slow to rebuild, and cause NNW to hang up. This invariably results in a post that has no category assigned (I think it is because NNW posts first, wait for MT to acknowledge then assigns the category).

Of course Mr Murphy being a good webmaster, my RSS feed and the side links all sport the wrong URL :(

You will be happy to learn that this doesn't happen with TypePad, but only because 1. there does not seem to be a TB autodiscovery (yet?) and 2. TypePad does not allow you to customize the URL! It remains reasonably cryptic though. That's all folks, I'm not supposed to spill the beans ;-)

But if someone has a cure for my // URLs, I'm listening!

[Update] Gosh, and even if NNW posts OK, it sends out TrackBacks with the wrong URL. A misconfiguration of my MT?