Htaccess redirecting is a powerful and somewhat frightening tool. After all, one typo and your domain is pointing nowhere in an infinite loop. It’s okay, though, because you can always get back in through FTP or Cpanel to fix it. As long as you kept a backup copy before making your changes. And that’s exactly what you need to do before following any of the instructions in this post. Back that sucker right up!
If you want to redirect one domain to another, that’s pretty simple, right? You just put code like this into the .htaccess file of the domain you’re redirecting:
Redirect 301 / http://olddomain.com/
But what if you want to redirect a subdomain from one URL to a totally different URL? Let’s say you’ve been writing a blog on a subdirectory of a site, and you’ve decided that subdirectory needs its own domain. Your current blog is at:
http://blog.olddomain.com/
And you want to redirect it to:
http://newdomain.com/
What can you possibly put in your htaccess to make that happen? Nothing. Except… well, the big trick is to put it in the .htaccess under the subdomain’s main folder. So, inside your “blog” subdomain on the old domain, you would put this code:
redirect 301 / http://newdomain.com/
It’s exactly the same as the code above – the only difference is which .htaccess file you put it in.
This also works well for redirecting Feedburner MyBrand feeds to new URLs. For example, go to your Feeds subfolder at olddomain.com, and in the htaccess for it, put:
redirect 301 / http://feeds.newdomain.com/newdomain
That redirects any address starting with “feeds.olddomain.com” to the exact MyBrand URL for your new Feedburner feed.
Genghis says
October 22, 2011 at 6:20 amHi Chris,
I have a main site running Joomla 1.5.23 and a subdomain hanging off it running WordPress 3.2.1.
The subdomain which I am currently setting up displays a blog and book store.
The subdomain is http://www.being-free.com/book-store.
One of the menu options on the subdomain has a link which takes you back to the main site which worked absolutely fine until I set up FeedBurner. Since then when I take this link it takes me to my feed burner feeds!
My original .htaccess file looked like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.being-free.com.com/book-store [R=301]
# Switch rewrite engine off in case this was installed under HostPay.
RewriteEngine Off
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 5
# BEGIN WordPress
DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /book-store/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /book-store/index.php [L]
# END WordPress
I then added the following for Feedburner so it looked like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.being-free.com.com/book-store [R=301]
# Switch rewrite engine off in case this was installed under HostPay.
RewriteEngine Off
# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/BeingFreeBlogBookStore [R=302,NC,L]
# temp redirect wordpress comment feeds to feedburner
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/BeingFreeBlogBookStore [R=302,NC,L]
Is there way I can create a rewrite to ensure the link back to my site works with feedburner?
Regards
Genghis
Chris says
October 22, 2011 at 9:25 amWell, I tried to visit your subdomain to see what was happening, and got a warning that WordPress was missing its config file, so I can’t really see what it’s doing wrong. If you could look into that and get back to me, I could see exactly what the link is doing and maybe have a better sense of what the problem is.