I have suc­cess­fully con­verted my blog from my own ‘home­grown’ soft­ware to the ubiq­ui­tous Word­Press. I think my time can be bet­ter spent than rein­vent­ing the wheel, espe­cially when it is avail­able free and eas­ily amended in open source form.

I have diverted old URL links includ­ing the RSS feeds using Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Here is an exam­ple of the code I used, placed in an htac­cess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog_rss.php$ /articles/feed/ [R=301,L]

This code rewrites any requests to blog_rss.php to /articles/feed so that any requests from the old feed are now redi­rected with a HTTP 301 response header to the new feed. The ‘L’ indi­cates that this is the last change the RewriteRule should make, effec­tively ignor­ing any rules that may come after this.

RFC2616 from W3 spec­i­fies HTTP 301 as ‘Moved Per­ma­nently.’ Using this code should help search engines like Google, Ask and Yahoo to update their indexes. I’ve done my part by fol­low­ing the pub­lished standards.

Word­Press also links nicely to Microsoft Word 2007, so I can take advan­tage of its gram­mar and spelling check­ers, and the use­ful fea­ture of hold­ing down Alt and click­ing on a word to access research tools such as dic­tio­nar­ies and a the­saurus. Skat­ter Tech’s arti­cle describes how to con­nect Word 2007’s Blog fea­ture to Word­Press.

I’d like to see Word­press sup­port­ing SQLite, but it looks like this isn’t on the cards for some time.

With the bur­den of mak­ing my own blog­ging soft­ware removed, I intend to be post­ing more inter­est­ing arti­cles in the future. I hope to be post­ing on more var­ied sub­jects than just web tech­nol­ogy. If there is any­thing you’d like to hear about, please leave a com­ment. You’ll also get a funny avatar mon­ster made for you if you com­ment