Newbury Online

Admit it, you’re on twitter quite a bit during the day (okay, during the night too). I’m also willing to bet that you have more than a few folks you like to follow but unless you’re online when they are you’re probably missing out on what they’re tweeting about – it’s time to stop missing those tweets by using the twitter’s RSS feed.

Now most folks are familiar with using RSS to follow their favorite blog but what most folks miss is the RSS feed button right below the pictures of all the folks that person is following.

All you need to do is click on that little orange icon to add that twitter’s tweets to your RSS reader of choice.

Once you’ve done that you won’t have to worry about missing out on something they’d tweeted about, even when you’re not logged in yourself.

For those that are worried about productivity by adding these RSS feeds to your reader you can effectively follow along without feeling the need to tweet back right away, retweet something or get caught up in reading the ‘all friends’ stream (and you know you do).

Do you use RSS feeds to follow your favorite twitters? Post in the comments and share.

Be sure to follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/scotnewbury

Having just moved my RPG Wordpress blog, of Dice and Dragons, to a new domain (ok, it’s a sub-domain) I had to over come two major challenges, first the actual move and second what about all those incoming links that the blog had accumulated over the 3+ years it’s been in existence.

As it turns out there is an article in the Wordpress Codex – Moving Wordpress – which gives a step by step process on moving your Wordpress blog. After backing up my data I followed the process and everything went smoothly and the blog was up and running at the new address in no time at all. I still need to finish up some housekeeping but with few exceptions everything is running just fine.

The other item I needed to address was how to handle all the inbound traffic that the blog was still seeing. While the number of hits and views had dropped off after I cut way back on posting there is still a fair amount of traffic to the site – I couldn’t possibly contact everyone that had an inbound link and I didn’t want to just “vanish” and leave a lot of broken links so I decided to setup redirection for the site.

Most folks at this point hit up Google and do a search on redirection just as I did. What you’ll find is a whole host of ways to handle this. I read through a number of them and after digesting them decided there had to be a better way than setting up .htaccess files, HTML or PHP redirects. It took a digging but I finally found and settled on a Wordpress plugin – Redirection on Urban Giraffe written by John Godley.

Installing this plugin was straightforward and went smoothly and thanks to the plugin’s ability to handle expressions I was able to set up redirects for entire YEARS worth of posts instead of having to one for each and every post as shown here (click for larger image):

All told it took less that 45 minutes to setup the redirection for the entire site and it’s been working without issue since then so I would recommend if you are in need of redirecting traffic for your Wordpress blog to check out this plugin.

Once again you can get it from John’s website at: Urban Giraffe or from the Wordpress Codex.

How have you used this plugin or did you use a different approach? Your comments are welcome.

Welcome to Newbury Online and I’m sure that there are a number of you that are going, “what do you mean welcome? I’ve been reading your blog for a while.”

We’ll here’s the deal – I decided to move my role-playing game blog to http://ofdiceanddragons.newburyonline.com as I’ve decided that I want to shift my major blogging focus to items that I seem to spend most of my time on – scripting, social networking, software hacks – and also to give me a platform to comment on things I may also find of interest.

Does this mean that I won’t post about gaming again? To be honest I probably will post from time to time as I still enjoy that aspect of my life but it is no longer the focus it once was.

For those that want to follow my role-playing game musing you’ll want to head to http://ofdiceanddragons.newburyonline.com and use the link there to update your RSS and/or email feed.

If you’re interested in what else I’ll be blogging about, stick around and enjoy the ride.