Switch to WordPress

I decided to make the switch from Movable Type to WordPress. I’m really happy with what I’ve seen of WP so far. There’s still plenty of clean-up work to do on my blog, but I went ahead and started redirecting the main index.html page and all the individual archive pages from my old blog to this one.

Redirecting the Main Page

I chose to do this by adding the following line to the .htaccess file in the root directory of my website. My old MT blog was in the blog sub-directory, but my new WP blog is at the root of my website.

RedirectMatch permanent    /blog[/index.html]*$    https://www.wombatnation.com

Update 5/22/04: I left out the $ at the end of the regular expression above. That was causing way too many things too match.

Redirecting Individual Entry Archives

I used Alex King’s redirection technique. After downloading and extracting the contents of the zip file, I copied the contents of the PHP file into the Template Body text edit window for the Individual Entry Archive template in Movable Type. I made two changes to the script. Since my new blog is at the root of my website, I changed the setting of the $URL variable to be

$URL = "https://www.wombatnation.com/";

Then, because I used only the year and the month in my MT archives URLs, I updated the value for the MTEntryDate as follows:

<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>

After saving the change to the template and republishing the individual archives, I put the following line in the .htaccess file in my MT install directory.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

Then, the redirection magic took over exactly as advertised.

Redirecting Syndication Feeds

Now the controversial bit. Do I automatically redirect RSS and Atom subscriptions, or do I post to the old blog one or more times with messages asking people to subscribe to the new feeds? I’m inclined to do the latter. I’m not sure how many news aggregators will notice the 301 status on the HTTP response and permanently change the URL for the subscription. Maybe I’ll ask people to update, start redirecting for some indefinite time, and then at some distant point in the future before the Sun explodes, delete the old feeds. Or maybe not.