Logo design, logo designer | My creative design blog has moved URL

38 spot-on reader comments to “My creative design blog has moved URL”

1. The Thinking Blog, on May 6th, 2007 said:

   Nice move.. good thing you still have your Technorati ranking!

2. The Thinking Blog, on May 6th, 2007 said:

   Ooopss.. btw, your old links don’t work. See:

   http://www.davidairey.com/blog/what-is-rss/

3. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 6th, 2007 said:
   Hi ilker,

   I’m hoping someone can help me figure out the 301 re-direct using the htaccess file.

   The idea is to redirect all URLs from /blog/ to the current root folder so they work okay.

4. Andy, on May 6th, 2007 said:

   Nice!

   This will be much easier now.

   :)

5. Paul Enderson, on May 7th, 2007 said:

   You should be using RewriteRule in your htaccess file, rather than a Redirect 301…

   Try adding this, just before the default WordPress rewrites for Permalinks:

   RewriteRule ^/blog/$ http://www.davidairey.com/ [R=301,L]

   The 301 tells browsers and spiders it is a permanent redirect, and the L ensures that no other rewrites are processed on the URL before it reaches WordPress.

   If you already have ‘RewriteEngine on’ in your htaccess then the rewrite above should come on the line below it. If you don’t then stick them both in!

   If you’ve got any current URLs with query strings in them, then you need to change the parameters to include QSA - like this:

   [R=301,QSA,L]

   QSA means “Query String Append” and tells Apache to pass any query string present to the new URL.

   Don’t quote me on this though… It’s been a long time since I dabbled in htaccess coding, and I may be a bit rusty! ;)

   Good luck!

6. Paul Enderson, on May 7th, 2007 said:

   Oh, and if it *does* go wrong, and your site goes offline, then just remove the lines and all will work as it was…

7. RomeoAngel, on May 7th, 2007 said:

   I will agree witht he move. I want to create my company’s web site at the main directory as well that’s why I have my blog under /blog but if you believe it is better for you, you’ve done well.

   (We have to change the feed’s URL right ? )

8. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 7th, 2007 said:
   Hey Paul,

   Thanks for that, although I couldn’t get it working. I tried a couple of variations but had to revert to the default. First time I got a 500 server error on all pages and second time the homepage would work but all articles were unavailable.

   I look into it some more and see what I can find out.

   Romeo,

   The feed URL remains the same as I use third party FeedBurner and a static RSS address. Best of luck with your Blackbox packaging.

9. Terinea Tech Tips, on May 7th, 2007 said:

   I’ve been thinking about changing my too, thanks for the link on how to do this for Wordpress!

10. Lakshmi, on May 7th, 2007 said:

    David! I have some suggestions for you…
    1. Create a portfolio category in WP. Note the number of the category. Post your portfolio work as WP posts itself, in this category. When you post, do not give the posts any other category tags.
    2. Next create a “category-##.php” page in your theme folder, where ## is the category number.You can design this to blend in with the site or make it slightly different/unique etc.
    3. Add a menu link called portfolio, where the link resolves to the URL, “yourblogname/category/portfolio” and include it in your blog menu.
    4. Now this way, you have a seamless site, with not too many changes. By doing this, you are making your portfolio searchable.
    5. In the category-##.php file, if you want feedback for your portfolio entries, include comments_template(); otherwise, drop the same.

    Hope this helps :)

11. Aaron :: miLienzo.com, on May 7th, 2007 said:

    I think your feed has stopped working? I was wondering why you hadn’t posted for a couple of days and came to your site and discovered the change around.

    Have you updated Feedburner?

12. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 7th, 2007 said:
    Lakshmi,

    Thanks a lot for your suggestion. At first I had thought about a single page in the top nav, but that’s probably a better route.

    Aaron,

    Thanks to you too! I’d forgotten to update the FeedBurner link! Cheers :D

13. Chilligavva :: Lakshmi Mareddy, on May 7th, 2007 said:

    David, you need to login to Mybloglog.com and repoint ur site url to the root. Its still pointing to the old site.. I got a 404 error :(

14. goldcoaster, on May 8th, 2007 said:

    Personally I can’t help but maybe you could ask either at the forums on wordpress.org or even the company that you are hosting with.
    It seems that there are planty of clever people posting though so I am sure they will have you sorted out soon.

15. Kevin Henney, on May 8th, 2007 said:

    Not sure if you found a solution yet, but if not, I think this will do what you’re looking for:

    RewriteRule blog/(.*) $1 [L,R=301]

    That should remove the “blog” subdirectory from the URL. Feel free to drop me an email (and maybe send your current .htaccess file) if you have trouble getting it to work.

16. Paul Enderson, on May 8th, 2007 said:

    Yup. Kevin’s right! I’ve been sitting here, trying to figure it out - and he’s usurped me to it… ;)

    I believe that Kevin’s rule will also take out anything else after the main domain - meaning that you couldn’t set up say domain.com/portfolio. Am I correct Kevin?

17. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 8th, 2007 said:
    Thanks Lakshmi,

    I forgot that one too! Talk about preparation.

    goldcoaster, Kevin, Paul,

    I added the following line after the ReWriteEngine On line of the .htaccess file:

    RedirectMatch 301 /blog(.*) ht*tp://www.davidairey.com/$1

    (with the star removed from between the ht tp to break the hyperlink). That’s done the trick!

    Thanks very much for your time though.

18. Paul Enderson, on May 8th, 2007 said:

    Interesting… Didn’t occur to me to use RedirectMatch, as it only came in with Apache 1.3 - and I’m running 1.2 (legacy purposes - don’t ask) on my servers!

    Glad you’ve fixed it! :)

19. Kevin Henney, on May 8th, 2007 said:

    Paul - that RewriteRule I left would only strip out the “blog” subdirectory, so it would still be possible to have example.com/portfolio.

    David - I still get a 404 if I try to access articles at their old …/blog/… address.

20. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 8th, 2007 said:
    Kevin,

    Thanks very much for letting me know.

    Somehow, the redirect that I added earlier became ‘un-saved’ in the .htaccess file. I’m not sure how this happened but it was working.

    I’ve added that line to the file again and I believe it’s back to normal.

    Let’s hope it doesn’t disappear!

    Again, thanks.

21. Sean, on May 8th, 2007 said:

    I’m using a .htaccess redirect to redirect sean-dinner.com to sean-dinner.com/blog/ and it works great. Good to see you have it figured out! :D

22. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 8th, 2007 said:
    Interesting Sean.

    What plans have you for sean-dinner.com? Will you create something else at that location?

    I’ve bumped my page rank down by switching, but better to do it now than another three months down the line (it was inevitable).

23. Ahsan R. Shami, on May 10th, 2007 said:

    David,

    I just got a 404 when trying to head to /blog, so it’s not yet fixed.

24. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 10th, 2007 said:
    Thanks very much, Ahsan.

    I’m working on it now.

25. kucau, on May 10th, 2007 said:

    hi david, actually which one of htaccess rewrite rules work? ive seen few rules here but kinda confused which one worked .

26. David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 10th, 2007 said:
    Hi Kucau,

    Here’s what my .htaccess file reads at present:

    ——————-

    # BEGIN WordPress

    RewriteEngine On
    RedirectMatch 301 /blog(.*) http://www.davidairey.com/1
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

    # END WordPress

    ——————-

    Thing is, it’ll work for around a day or so, then something mysterious happens and the RediretMatch 301 line disappears.

    As soon as it’s fixed for good I’ll let you know.

27. Andy Beard, on May 11th, 2007 said:

    This plugin might cure a lot of your problems

    http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/

28. kucau, on May 11th, 2007 said:

    ermm thanks david , ill wait for ur solution before making my move :)

29. Graphic design Edinburgh and keyword search ranking : David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on May 17th, 2007 said:

    [...] their website has a Google page rank of 5/10. My current page rank is 4/10 but it was 5/10 before I changed my blog URL, so that’s matchable. Graphic Partners have 102 backlinks to their site. When I ran [...]

30. Flyer designs : David Airey :: Creative Design ::, on June 15th, 2007 said:

    [...] I moved my blog from davidairey.com/blog to davidairey.com I took my portfolio offline in the process. This is the start of my portfolio upload, and any [...]

31. Columbus Ohio SEO, on August 23rd, 2007 said:

    Looks like you got this all figured out. Thanks for the link to the hta plugin… I was looking for something just like that to get the www vs. http:// war figured out.

    -Brad

32. David Airey :: Graphic Designer, on August 23rd, 2007 said:
    Hi Brad,

    Yeah, all sorted now cheers.

    Thanks for stopping by.

33. kristarella, on October 4th, 2007 said:

    Did you ever figure out why the rewrite line disappeared? Mine has done that too.

34. David Airey :: Graphic Designer, on October 4th, 2007 said:
    I’ve no idea, Kris.

    Sorry to read you’re having the same problem, and also that I can’t be of help.

35. kristarella, on October 4th, 2007 said:

    The only thing I can figure is that WP rewrites htaccess if you let it - a bit weird, but making it read only seems to have fixed it. Thanks for your concern :)

36. David Airey :: Graphic Designer, on October 4th, 2007 said:
    Hmmm, I know that there’s a WP htaccess file, and that if you make any changes to it you should keep your old version when conducting an update.

    Did you notice the change after updating WP? My only guess is that you removed the old .htaccess file, but not sure.

37. Andy Beard, on October 4th, 2007 said:

    You need to make sure that any rewrite code is outside the Wordpress definitions, either before or after.

    What is required for Wordpress 2.3 might be slightly different to previous versions because the whole rewrite engine changed.

38. David Airey :: Graphic Designer, on October 4th, 2007 said:
    Thanks for adding your advice, Andy.

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