Ant Drewery » WordPress

Redirecting a WordPress blog using .htaccess

Anthony Drewery — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:12:23 +0000

I recently moved my WordPress blog from being self hosted to wordpress.com. The transfer was easy and straightforward. I simply upgraded the original blog to WordPress 2.7 then ran an export followed by an import into the new blog. This uses the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) format.

WordPress.com allows me to use my own domain name (blog.drewery.net) but doesn’t let me use a subfolder structure as I did with my original blog (www.drewery.net/blog). This presented a challenge for my existing Google rankings with links to the old location. The solution came from Chris Himsworth, a developer that I work with, in the form of a custom .htaccess file. The file sits in the location of the original blog, parses the URL then redirects to the new location appending part of the original path. By using a 301 permamanet redirect Google then updates the links. The file is below:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.drewery.net/$1 [R=301,L]

WordPress WP-ShortStat plugin issues

Anthony Drewery — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:43:26 +0000

Some time ago my blog stats stopped updating. I was using Jeff Minard’s WP-ShortStat plugin that was based on ShortStat by Shaun Inman. I did a little digging at the time and ran some MySQL DB maintenance as I was convinced I’d reached some sort of limitation in my hosted environment. This didn’t help and I let the matter drop as I was busy with other commitments.

It now seems like this is a known issue that began when I upgraded to WordPress 2.02. Luckily Markus Kämmerer has continued development of the WP-ShortStat plugin, adding new features as well as fixing the bug. You can get the updated plugin at http://blog.happyarts.de/wp-shortstat/. Installation is a breeze and my stats are updating once again.

WordPress 2.0

Anthony Drewery — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:49:44 +0000

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and so far, so good. The upgrade process was well documented and went without a hitch. All my existing plugins continued to function. However, as stressed in the documentation make sure you backup your installation and database first. I do regular scheduled backups of my database using the WordPress Database Backup plugin by Scott Merill. It backs up the database and emails it to me nightly.

I’m still playing with the updated admin interface but the main change I’ve noticed is WYSIWYG editing when writing posts, which is a welcome improvement. There are also some nice touches with the post preview and file uploads. This is only my first post with the new version but if you run your own WordPress server the upgrade is worth checking out.