Serendipity Forums

One of my categories has gone so well I want to make a separate blog of it.
How would I best go about redirecting traffic from that category and all the articles in it, to the new blog? There are about a dozen articles that get fair daily traffic from months ago.

tanx

RJ

Hi!

By using a .htacces RewriteRule redirect, google it up. Alternately, if your server does not support Apache mod_rewrite you will need to patch your index.php file and check for $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and then do a PHP headeR('Location: ...') redirect if the REQUEST_URI matches your target category URL.

Bear in mind this will not carry google pagerank over.

Regards,
Garvin

I understand about Page Rank and have apache.

I have two categories with about 100 articles.
So I first move all 100 articles to the new blog.
If I want each to go to the new specific article I would ignore the categories and make a list in .htaccess of 100 article to article redirects.

If I want the traffic to go from each article and only to the new blog where they would have to find it themselves, then I would only have to do 2 redirects CATEGORY to NEW BLOG.

I think its the CATEGORY idea I have to go with. Because I want to keep adding these category articles to the old blog AND the new until the PR of the new one catches up to the old one.

By category they would all automatically go to the new blog. If I went article to article I would have to go change my .htaccess each time I put out a new article.

Do I have the gist of this?

Hi!

I believe this sounds workable, yes. I'm not sure though, because I've never had the need to think about those issues, I'm more of a fan of a central blog instead of "own blogs for special categories"

Regards,
Garvin

What has happened is I have a political blog and one of my bloggers puts up celebrity and oddity things once in awhile, often with the word BREASTS. Traffic ZOOMS and keeps going for months and months on the same article!! But its off topic, adsense does not appy well and it kind of sullies the blog. If I went with a separate blog I could work that topic on its own. And linking to it with both by PR 5 sites, I could get the PR up to 4 in a month or so.

Question two!

Should I start the new blog from a fresh install of Serendipy?
Or can I move the whole thing, DB and all, to the new server and then just change things (I think this would be easier) but not sure how to do it.

tanx

RJ

Hi!

Ah, okay. Two completely diverting topics of course don't fit so well into a singular blog.

It is a good idea to migrate that and keep content on both blogs for a while, and use the "unfitting" blog as the one that redirects category overviews to the "fitting" blog.

I'd personally create the new blog by cloning the original s9y installation (like outlined in the FAQ). Then in the new blog you simply delete the content that the new blog should no longer have.

A fresh install would only work if you're talking about VERY few articles that you will then need to copy+paste to the new install. It's not so easy to migrate data of an old installation to a new one (unless you know SQL well).

Regards,
Garvin

Wouldn't a wildcard redirect with a 301 error redirect all the articles, AND keep the PageRank?

No, because our URLs don't include the category. That would only work if you had assigned custom permalinks to all the entries with useful substrings or something.

Sorry; nothing to see here. Carry on.

ahh....

hmmm... Thinking this out further, though I have 100 articles to move, there are only about 10 that get that evergreen traffic. So I would guess the simple way is just to 301 those 10 articles and be done with it?

Yeah, but...

We're pretty lenient with our URLs. Anything with the ID, a dash, any characters (even none!) and .html is recognized as the article with appropriate ID. So people could still access that category by misspelling the article name.

Unless you made your .htaccess catch it by matching the same way: , say.

You're making me wonder if a Serendipity-based redirect might be a good idea. Give the admin some way to "shut down" or "move" a whole category to a different location. But that would at least need a plugin, maybe changes to core code.