Set up redirects for old regional URLs

[shawnbot]

When we implement regional pages (as sketched in #1267) we'll need to:

• look at the analytics to see if anyone is actually linking to the regional explore data views, so that we can decide whether to...
• set up redirects for the old URLs that send visitors to the new ones

One way to do this could be to put together some redirect logic for different URLs in the form of URI templates that could live in the front matter of each page, as in:

redirects:
  region: {region}/{?year}
  region,commodity: {region}/{?year}#{commodity}
  region,commodity,product: {region}/{?year}#{commodity}/{product}

So the JavaScript for that page would check (from the longest to the shortest) whether the hash contained all of those parameters, and for the first one it finds, redirect to the corresponding URL.

[coreycaitlin]

Brief analytics report over in #1458 — briefly, there isn't a ton of traffic, and I don't think we should worry about it too much, as long as people land on explore data pages.

[meiqimichelle]

@shawnbot Is this still relevant, or are there individual tasks that need to be managed (ie, explicit redirects from the old urls to the explore data homepage)?

[shawnbot]

I think @coreycaitlin's analysis is spot on. Having redirects in place would be good to handle cases in which we link to deprecated URLs, though, unless we're planning on fixing those links before release. I have some experience doing this with the front end guide (funnily enough, in the opposite direction: from multiple pages to anchors on a single page), and it should be pretty simple.

[coreycaitlin]

@meiqimichelle Is there anything else for me to tackle on this? I'm happy to do it, but not sure about next steps.

[shawnbot]

Redirects are working! Let's close this one.