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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

Yup. The only problem is with using shorturls (since there no DB object ID to map to).

You could have your static generator create symlinks for each post at the short url pointing to the actual page at the canonical url to handle this, and set your server up to follow symlinks.

Alternatively it could generate a table of redirects for you to put in your server config/htaccess.

Is this possible on S3?

No idea I'm afraid, it depends on their setup. I used it as one approach when generating a static blog a while ago under Apache, but there are plenty of options (using config redirects, using symlinked pages or dirs, using duplicate html pages with rel=canonical, using js redirects in extra html pages), and I'm sure some if not all of them would work on S3. As long as you're generating statically anyway, you can always add another step to generate all your short links automatically too in whatever form works on your server...

I get around this with nginx rewrite rules. Since my old blog was Posterous, I spit out a bunch of rewrites to map my old URLs to new ones, e.g.:

    rewrite ^/superpacking-js-demos$ /2011-08-31_Superpacking_JS_Demos.html;

(Another solution is to have a directory for each post containing an index html file. I do it that way myself using Jekyll.)

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