Gulf News linking tips

Gulf News as many will have noticed has undergone a revamp. For bloggers, this will have messed up every single one of your old links to GN articles. Here is a short guide to try and relink, and to post future links correctly:

1. New story links
New stories don't stay in their original place for very long. Take this one, Jebel Hafeet, which appears on site at:
http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/editorial_opinion/nation/10002836.html
It won't be there forever. You need to find its permanent home by doing a search for "hafeet", to get:
http://search.gulfnews.com/articles/05/12/05/10002556.html

2. Old links
Currently, some links have to be recreated part-manually. Hopefully this will change. Here's how to do it:

(i) Click the old link, for example this one:
http://gulfnews.com/Articles/NationNF.asp?ArticleID=166788
It will hopefully take you to a redirect page that takes you to the new link:
http://search.gulfnews.com/articles/05/05/27/166788.html

NB: Avoid cutting and pasting the "relocation link" shown on the 404 page - in this case http://search.gulfnews.com/scripts/locatearticle.jsp?ArticleCode=166788. Get the final URL it takes you to.

(ii) Keyword search the article you are trying to refind using the Advanced search. If you find it, and it works, hooray!

NB: You may (very rarely, and I think this is temporary) get given a link that doesn't work, and goes to an error page. In which case check that the URL starts with http://search.gulfnews... - if it doesn't, paste that bit in.

(iii) You may struggle to find your old articles. However, if you know the exact date they were published, you can manually recreate them. As you can see, original and moved articles end with the same six digits. The bit that changes is the start and the date. So have a fiddle and see if you can find it.

It does appear that more and more articles are being relinked via the relocation page, so you may be able to rely on step (i) pretty much indefinitely. But do take with linking new stories, because these are obviously the ones your blog visitors are most likely to click on.