kfitz

Get Me Rewrite!

Consider this a plea for help:

This site has been through some serious migrations over the years. It’s had two different hosting providers and three different blog platforms, among other kinds of changes. As a result, its permalink structure has changed over time, and I’ve had to use mod_rewrite to grapple with redirecting old inbound links to where they need to go.

By and large, I’ve been able to manage this. I’ve got one big lingering problem, however, that results from neither a server nor a platform migration.

For several years, Planned Obsolescence ran on a single-site WordPress installation, with pretty /%postname%/ permalinks. A little while back, I got the bright idea that I should consolidate it with a few other WP instances I was running, through one clean multi-site installation.

This is now the main site of that multi-site instance. But multi-site WP adds /blog/ to the URLs of all posts in that main site. And so inbound links that are looking for http://plannedobsolescence.net/post-title get 404’d.

I have searched around, both within wordpress.org and out in the larger internets, for a way to use htaccess to redirect such inbound links to http://plannedobsolescence.net/blog/post-title. But I’ve run into several problems, most notably, infinite redirect loops: even when I include a !blog condition in the rewrite rule, the request still gets caught in some redirect vortex. I also need to make sure that a few pages and secondary blog directories don’t wind up with /blog/ added to their URLs.

I’ve created a 404 page that attempts to explain the problem, and I should probably just let it go at that, but knowing all those errors are out there makes my OCD kick in. So if there were a mod_rewrite guru out there willing to help me work through this problem, I’d be enormously grateful.

Webmentions

No replies yet.