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Create a 301 redirect at zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana to americanamap.org #1187

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ernstki opened this issue Jan 3, 2025 · 9 comments · Fixed by ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana#1
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Create a 301 redirect at zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana to americanamap.org #1187

ernstki opened this issue Jan 3, 2025 · 9 comments · Fixed by ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana#1
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@ernstki
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ernstki commented Jan 3, 2025 •
edited by ZeLonewolf
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Hi @ZeLonewolf,

I was reading the blog of a developer who works on GNOME Maps, and he refers to the Americana project in several posts.

In each case, he links to https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana, which is now a 404.

Would you be willing to put that back up, solely for the purpose of creating a 301 redirect to https://americanamap.org?

I am far from an expert here, but I believe an index.html with a meta http-equiv tag would be sufficient to do the job:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;https://americanamap.org">
    <title>Redirecting to americanamap.org…</title>
  </head>
  <body>Redirecting you to <a href="https://americanamap.org">americanamap.org</a>…</body>
</html>

This way old URL used in (presumably) dozens, hundreds, thousands of social media shares, blog posts, emails, READMEs, CHANGELOGs, and so on will continue to work.

Thanks for your consideration.

—Kevin
@ZeLonewolf
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Thanks for the suggestion -- this might work. It will also need to have a github action to publish to github pages but that should be achievable without too much difficulty.

@ZeLonewolf ZeLonewolf self-assigned this Jan 3, 2025
@ZeLonewolf
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Done! Thanks for the suggestion.

@1ec5
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1ec5 commented Jan 5, 2025

Can you add a readme to the repository that refers to this repository? A lot of people probably had bookmarks pointing to the old name.

I think the reason we didn’t create the redirect site originally is that it would break all the links to individual files and issues in this repository from before it moved. Now those are all unhelpful 404s without a link to either repository, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about that now, even by deleting the new repository.

@1ec5 1ec5 reopened this Jan 5, 2025
@ZeLonewolf ZeLonewolf mentioned this issue Jan 5, 2025
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@1ec5 1ec5 mentioned this issue Jan 15, 2025
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1ec5 commented Jan 15, 2025

There are still a number of broken links to the old repository all over GitHub (including in the GNOME Maps source code). Some may matter more than others; we could post PRs for some of the mentions strategically.

This was referenced Jan 15, 2025
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@ernstki
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ernstki commented Jan 16, 2025

I think the reason we didn’t create the redirect site originally is that it would break all the links to individual files and issues in this repository from before it moved.

@1ec5 I'm interested in this, just because I'm a preservationist by nature. Is there a specific example you could point me to?

@1ec5
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1ec5 commented Jan 16, 2025 •
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For example, I had to fix this link on the OSM Wiki that had previously pointed to a PR at the old repository location. The old URL was redirecting to #632 until the stub repository was created, which turned it into a 404.

@ZeLonewolf also had to devise a script to mass find-and-replace broken images and issue links throughout the Americana repository’s issue tracker, but plenty of other links remain in other repositories that we don’t have write access to.

This was a catch-22 for us: there was no way to preserve both deep links to the published site and deep links to the repository. Personally, I would’ve chosen to preserve the links to the repository, since the published site only has a few pages in it and the repository serves as the historical record. But I can see how someone would’ve come to a different conclusion based on their encounters with Americana in other places.

@1ec5
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1ec5 commented Jan 16, 2025

If we do want to revisit the choice of using a stub repository, it might be possible to revert to the previous state by deleting the stub repository, then moving the real repository to @ZeLonewolf’s account and back to @osm-americana. But I don’t know if that would cause any headaches around user permissions, so definitely test it out with a throwaway repository before trying it out on something we care about.

@ernstki
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ernstki commented Jan 19, 2025 •
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This was a catch-22 for us: there was no way to preserve both deep links to the published site and deep links to the repository. Personally, I would’ve chosen to preserve the links to the repository, since the published site only has a few pages in it and the repository serves as the historical record. But I can see how someone would’ve come to a different conclusion based on their encounters with Americana in other places.

@1ec5 Agreed that the deep links into the old GitHub repo are equally if not more important. However, unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't believe those two are mutually-exclusive?

It might be worth asking GitHub support if they can retroactively establish that "repository moved to" behavior from github.com/zelonewolf/openstreetmap-americana → github.com/osm-americana/openstreetmap-americana. They might even have some rake task on the backend that does it, saving you some trial-and-error.

After that, hypothetically:

zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana 
  → osm-americana.github.io/openstreetmap-americana
  → americanamap.org

It appears that the latter redirect is already in place.

@1ec5
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1ec5 commented Jan 19, 2025 •
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GitHub has previously helped some repositories unhook fork links, so maybe they could help with restoring the redirect we had originally, but it probably will require some patience.

The redirect from https://osm-americana.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/ to https://americanamap.org/ is the default behavior for GitHub Pages. Unfortunately, GitHub Pages does not redirect from a deployment’s previous repository name to its new one, hence the broken links you found originally.

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