Some tips when relocating your blog

Use Feedburner

This one is incredibly handy. Whilst the "killer" feature of feedburner tends to be telling you how many subscribers you have, or where they're from, or what browser they use, or how they like their cereal, for me Feedburner Rocks because of the extra level of abstraction it provides between me & you. I've changed RSS feed twice since you've all subscribed, but you don't know that, cause you don't have to. I talk to feedburner, feedburner talks to you, so everything stays peachy while I move things around.

Apache Redirects

When you're moving server and you don't what to lose or break what little linkage you've built up around the net, these redirects will save your life. There are two kinds you should get used to, the sort when you want to repoint one file to another (useful for telling hotlinkers to piss off), and the kind when you want to preserver part of the request, whilst changing the other part (useful when you are moving a blog). Thanks to Apache, both are very simple and straight forward. Here they are

Simple redirects

So you made the mistake of storing one of those forum STFU images on your site. It got indexed, now half of myspace wants to load it, and you're paying the bill. Step one is always to rename or delete the picture, but if you're the bitter sort step 2 is to send them an image they weren't expecting...

1. Redirect permanent /~dez/javalogo.gif http://www.funpowered.com/pics/steve-ballmer.jpg

I used the above to send people who were hotlinking my Java logo a beautiful picture of Steve Ballmer in all his WWF glory. What a man. To achieve this effect, place the above lines in your .htaccess file. (If you don't have one , make one containing the above line.

Warning: If you're passing a hotlinking on to someone else, be sure that their server can take the hammering and that they won't end up footing a large bandwidth bill. If you're worried about doing anyone harm, just point the link at http://www.live.com, Lord knows they could do with the traffic

Redirecting blogs

Blogs are obviously slightly more difficult than images or individual pages. Firstly make sure you have your entire blog up and running on the new server, and have migrated your data across. At this point you now have 2 working copies of your blog on the net. You don't want to publicise that fact, otherwise you'll be effectively maintaining comments on 2 separate blogs. This is why I "didn't just leave the other one there" Michael

Also you want to act quickly, otherwise people will post comments on your old blog, that won't be moved to the new one. Here is how you make everything on the old server point to the right place on the new one...

1. RewriteEngine on
2. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} -U
3. RewriteRule ^(.+) http://destraynor.com/serendipity/$1

Again, simply bang the above lines into a .htaccess file in the directory of your blog on the old server. In my case, my blog was held in a directory called serendipity , so in the serendipity folder I had that .htaccess file. It redirects every request that comes as far as the serendipity folder to destraynor.com/serendipity/ and it will append on the original request for that folder, i.e. it'll change http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/serendipity/index.php?/archives/6-Th... to this http://destraynor.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/6-...

Meaning that all my old posts can still be found, no broken links, no emails with "Where has your ipod article gone d00d" and no worries. All for 3 copyable lines of code. Thats pretty much all I had to do, welcome to the new home!

Unrelated

People have been asking about how the old server coped with being #1 on reddit. Short answer: It coped fine with the load, its the number of PHP sessions that were created that caused problem. As far as being a one-hit-wonder goes, here is what that looks like...

It's funny how the most off the cuff blog post gets the most attention, I wasn't even gonna post it except that Bart talked me into it. The most off the cuff quote of the lot was the most popular one...

Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is.

I wrote that, because at the time of writing there were 2 popular items on Digg, The Top 12 Rails Tutorials, and the Top 30 Rails Tutorials. Thats an annoying trend I've seen. People don't seem to realise that all you need for learning a programming language is one good tutorial and a compiler. It reminds me of seeing final year students photocopying lecture notes, in the hope that the information will somehow transfer from the photocopier to their brains with no work required. In web 2.0 terms the equivalent process seems to be the following...

Anyways, I'll be posting something for everyone soon, a book review, a post increasing AdWord revenue, some really interesting CS-education stuff, and another programming puzzle. If none of that interests you, maybe this is more to your taste

Update:Some people are reporting that comments seem to be broken . They're coming through okay, just seems to be some hiccups with redirecting you after the comment is posted. It will all be fixed soon, I promise. Until then comment away!