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Writing Online

on my (ab)use of Radio Userland
 Wednesday, August 07, 2002

Continuity

Jon Udell on moving Radio to InfoWorld's server:
- If you change the main template and regenerate your old site with a message pointing to the new site, remember to change it back when you regenerate the new site.

- I wish I could insert into UserLand's Apache the one mod_rewrite directive that would redirect everything to the new site :-)

- I seem to have screwed up the old RSS file along the way. I really wish there were a way to replace its contents with:

[sample removed because Userland hasn't fixed a Very Important Bug]

As it stands, this might be the most disruptive part of the whole operation. Subscribers to the feed (evidently there are a goodly number) will need to resubscribe at the new address (standard version with short descriptions, alternate version with long ones). Come to think of it, there might be a way to make Radio upload an RSS file containing the redirect. But I can't face doing the experiment at 2:30AM...

He has three desires:

  1. notify readers of the change
  2. maintain continuity in readership, by redirection
  3. update subscriptions

For the first, a simple blurb on his site suffices. For the second, he needs the minimal cooperation of Userland. The third requires a standard behavior. There was some small discussion of using a newElement. Now it appears that Kevin Burton has specified a new module for RDF, mod_subscription, which could help.

The second desire, continuity, can be provided very simply by Userland. Radio does not upload files which begin with a dot (.), for Security Reasons. Therefore an .htaccess file, which could modify the Apache configuration on radio.weblogs.com to include user-specific directives, can not be used. This is, however, what is needed to maintain continuity. So,

  1. Let Userland add the line

    AccessFileName somethingThatDoesNotBeginWithADot

    to the Apache configuration file, httpd.conf, and let Userland add

    AllowOverride FileInfo

    to the appropriate Directory section of said configuration file.

  2. Let Userland inform the users that this feature is available.
  3. Let the user create a file, somethingThatDoesNotBeginWithADot, and let the user fill the file with this line 
    Redirect temp /0100887 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell
  4. And if that is satisfactory, let the user change said line 
    Redirect permanent /0100887 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell

3:33:44 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Jon Udell's blog has moved from radio.weblogs.com to weblogs.infoworld.com. In the process, he's listed the caveats that I ran into during my moves. But he lists them in a more coherent fashion.

9:30:02 AM #
categories: Writing Online