benja22

Sometimes you just have to do things the hard way. I’ve mentioned before that I love to waste time but this time I believe I may have over-done it.

One of the things I like to waste time on is my other blog, http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/mandriva It’s more or less dedicated to the Mandriva Linux operating system. I now find myself stuck for the next year or two with a laptop that has the Ubuntu Linux operating system installed. Mandriva and the Dell Inspiron 1525 are just incompatible. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Now that I’ll be learning about this operating system which I only like a little bit (Mandriva seems to have more life. I haven’t found the soul in Ubuntu yet), I decided I may as well blog about it as well.

Not wanting to set up another wordpress blog site with it’s own seperate MySql database, I decided I’d just add a catagory to my Mandriva site and write about both operating systems there.

Now that I’ll be blogging about two operating systems I couldn’t very well call it by it’s original link address. http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/mandriva had to be changed to something else. I wasn’t real sure how to go about doing this tricky little maneuver. I realized that all the individual posts had their own links. To be able to click on them, either directly at the site or through a google hit or trackback I needed to do some serious redirecting.

I know a little about the .htaccess file. I know that I can somehow put a 301 redirect in there so that shouldn’t have been a problem. I didn’t realize that there were going to be three of them in the path from http: to /linux and another in /mandriva but I figured I knew enough to dive in.

In the spirit of “neo-geeks don’t CLI” I decided to forgo the secure shell to log into my host server in california to create the linux/ directory and then ask the server to please mv mandriva/ to linux/. No, I decided instead to open up a double paned file manager and ftp into the server from both sides and thus copy my files in splendid graphic user interface glory.

Did you know, that I am able to type these words, save them, and publish them for you dear reader, as the result of the care taking of seventy-three directories and two thousand five hundred and sixty three individual files? Well, had I known that, I wouldn’t have moved my blog two grooves over on a hard drive in California via a double paned ftp connected file manager in Kansas.

I decided to use my file transfer time to read up on the .htaccess files. One of which is going to need some reconfiguring. The manual for htaccess goes something like this;

• DESCRIPTION

This module provides an object-oriented interface to Apache .htaccess files. Currently the
ability exists to read and write simple htaccess files.

• METHODS

new()

my $obj = Apache::Htaccess->new($path_to_htaccess);

Creates a new Htaccess object either with data loaded from an existing htaccess file or
from scratch

save()

$obj->save();

Saves the htaccess file to the filename designated at object creation. This method is
automatically called on object destruction.

I decided to check the internet.

Ahh! Simple enough. Edit .htaccess with:

Redirect 301 /blog/mandriva http://ben-armbruster.org/blog/linux

I saved and closed the file and clapped my hands together like a satisfied gardener brushing the dirt from his hands at supper time.

My work was bearing fruit. My “301 Redirect” directed me straight to a “404 Not Found” but it was something.

I moved my sure fire command from .htaccess file to .htaccess file. I must have edited at least half a dozen of them. Somewhere, there must be a porn site or two that keep coming up 404 Not Found as a result of my efforts on that California Server.

I did some more research and found some other commands that I tried. RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ and RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ looked promising with a bit of rework but still no dice.

I was a little tired but I managed to type redirect wordpress into a google window. Know what I found out? they have plugins that’ll do that for you. Yep.

I tried two of them. They offer the benifit of letting you edit the .htaccess file by typing your command into a nifty little window. They do put the commands in the correct directories .htaccess file though so that was at least a clue of where I should be digging my hole.

After about two hours of not getting these marvels of gtk frontended text editors to work, I dumped them and went back to Google.

Did I mention the sun came up? Yeah. The sun came up.

After scratching my head and trying to come up with the sure fire google search criteria it came to me. I snapped my fingers and typed “moving wordpress”, and there it was. My salvation on the wordpress.org site of all places.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

Want to move your WordPress site to another URL? another directory? another host? Yeah okay we can do that for you. Click here, click there, click that.

“You’re welcome.”

What a bunch of sissy geeks. Wouldn’t know BogoMIPS from Babelfish.

So I went ahead and did it myself with no help. I’d explain how but it’s complicated.

So anyway. If you want to visit my other blog it’s now residing at:

http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/linux/

Or if you want you can click on:

http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/mandriva/

Or

http://www.ben-armbruster.org/bog/ubuntu/

Either way, It’ll redirect you.