Quick and simple method, add to site.com’s main .htaccess file:
Redirect 301 index.xml http://site.com/feed/
Redirect 301 atom.xml http://site.com/feed/atom/
Add these at the top of the file, before all other lines.
The 301 is the code for “Moved Permanently”, and a good feed reader (and all search engines) will interpret this as a cue to change where they are looking for this feed/file in the future.
This does have a downside. A poorly written reader might not be able to interpret 301 codes correctly, and thus be unable to get the feed. I am unaware of any reader that will be unable to do this, because most are built on standard http code packages that can do this redirection transparently, but still, it is a possibility. However, there’s no way to help these people in any case (they’ll have to manually change their feeds), so it’s not generally something to worry about.
Something like in .htaccess might work (warning, I’m not an .htaccess wizard and this is based on something that seems to work for me in a similar scenario!)
# Catch the old feed references
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.xml?$ /feed/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^atom.xml?$ /feed/ [R=301,L]
May take some tweaking, but hopefully that’s close.
Doh. I’m slow. Hey Otto, am I close?
HandySolo: Yes, that is close. Only problem is that your atom.xml is pointing to an RSS feed now. 😉
The Redirect approach is slightly faster than a Rewrite approach. However, if Redirect doesn’t work on a particular server, Rewrites sometimes will. Depends on what Apache modules are loaded. Usually both are loaded and so for a simple redirect of a file that doesn’t need regular expression matching, Redirect is the way to go.
LOL
Hey, either of you guys know anything about MT – WP redirects?
Thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.
Oh, in my defense for pointing atom to RSS… where I’ve done this /feed/ was actually redirected to feedburner which handles the atom/rss thingie for me. 🙂
Hey, either of you guys know anything about MT – WP redirects?
No, but I could probably fake it.
LOL got an IM Otto?
(And thank you both for the help with the feed thing!!)
Just an FYI – I hired an outside programmer to do it for me. Was worth every penny! 🙂
