A Blogging Question

I've been practicing setting up a blog in the Layouts format so I can rescue my truncated monthly archives from Autopagination oblivion.

I'm ready to push the button to do the upgrade, but I have one question: Classic template blogs such as mine have the ability to use the post title line to link to another website. (This practice has gradually fallen out of favor with bloggers, as it's not available in the Blogger Layouts templates.) For instance, the titles of my movie reviews link to the relevant IMDb pages.

What I'm wondering is: what will happen to the links in my old post titles when I upgrade? Will they still work, or will they vanish and the post titles will instead link to the post itself, as is the case with new Layouts posts? I haven't been able to find the answer anywhere and am wondering if someone who has already upgraded can tell me what to expect.

It would be a painstaking process, but I could go in and add IMDb links to the bodies of old movie review posts. My movie posts continue to get regular hits years later, so I'd like them to still have the IMDb link one way or another.

However, I wouldn't be able to figure out what was originally linked in the post titles of hundreds of other posts, which would render many of them somewhat irrelevant without access to the original source material discussed in the posts.

If the title links go away, it seems as though Blogger is going to negatively impact my archives one way or another!  What a quandary...

Monday Update: Hmmmm, it looks like Blogger has decided to write code to enable scrolling through archives in Classic Templates. This was just posted today; a post by Blogger elsewhere says "We've generated some code on our end which will allow for the creation of pagination links on Classic Templates, which now lets you navigate through archive pages." I'll be checking it out.