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.

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