My blog post from 2012 titled "OAuth 2 Simplified" is my most popular article on my website by an order of magnitude. It is referenced by over 400 repositories on GitHub, and ranks very high in searches about OAuth. I still get tweets over four years later from people who discover it for the first time and are very appreciative of finding a succinct summary of the protocol. I wrote it in 2012, when OAuth 2.0 was still relatively new, and it was based on the best practices at the time.
Today I was reviewing the post, and realized that there were quite a few places where the industry standards have changed either in the terminology or in the best practices. I decided that I wanted to publish a new version of the post updated for 2017 based on what has happened in the industry over the last few years. I didn't feel comfortable updating the post at its current URL, from 2012, since that seemed like it would be rewriting history. But at the same time, I don't want to make people landing on that post from a web search or link from a GitHub repository to have to click another time to see the latest version of the post.
I decided on an interesting compromise. I took the existing post, rewrote parts of it, and published it at a new URL: https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/
I then took the old post, copied it verbatim, and published it at a new URL dated the same date as the old post: https://aaronparecki.com/2012/07/29/7/oauth2-simplified
The final step was creating a redirect from the post's old URL https://aaronparecki.com/2012/07/29/2/oauth2-simplified (note the "2" vs the "7") to the new URL that has no date component. (This is the part that required a new bit of code for p3k, in order to handle redirects from posts that would have otherwise matched a post permalink.)
My plan going forward is to always keep the version at https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/ up to date, and to keep snapshots of older versions at date-based permalinks at the time when I publish an updated version. I link to the previous versions of the post at the bottom of the primary post. (Manually for now, until I decide this is an important enough feature to automate).
I think this strike the right balance between providing visitors with the most current information with the least amount of effort, while still preserving the history of the older versions.
