Two weeks ago, I described in very generic terms how to redirect your RSS feed. Funny enough, this week, Nathan Weinberg of Inside Google is struggling with just this problem. He asks...
I moved my site to a new host, which screwed up the way Wordpress handles URIs. While it didn’t break any of my post links, it moved my RSS feeds URI from site/index.php/feed/ to site/feed/, and a lot of readers aren’t getting the feeds anymore. What can I do to redirect them to the new feeds, without having access to the URIs of the old feeds?
This problem requires a little bit of Apache knowledge. I can think of three ways to fix this problem.
- Install mod_rewrite (I like this module, but understand that it might be a little complicated for the mundane blogger)
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html - 301/302 redirect
http://www.404-error-page.com/301-apache-httpd.conf-redirect .shtml - .htaccess redirects
http://www.garnetchaney.com/htaccess_tips_and_tricks.shtml
Any other ideas for Nathan?
Update from Nathan...
Here’s what worked for me: I added a permanent redirect in the .htaccess of my blog root pointing the relative URL of my old RSS feeds to the absolute URL of the new feeds. For example, one line reads:
Redirect permanent /index.php/feed/ http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/feed/
In my extreme case, I had to find every variation on my RSS URL (since WordPress uses virtual addresses for the feed), and redirect each one separately to the new one.
Thanks a ton for the help, Randy!
 - Nathan
Randy