Dopp Juice Archive

Here’s a problem I ran into when migrating from b2evolution to WordPress: my old RSS feed, which was running through multiple aggregators across the web, suddenly didn’t work anymore. The obvious (and painful) solution was to manually inform every system and person who cares about my blog that I’m now on a new feed. I was already diving into that that task, and planning to let a few systems drop off the wayside in the process.

Thankfully, Jordan M.E. (one of my favorite programmers), sent me the easier answer. She told me to use an htaccess redirect, so the old feed becomes the new feed. Here’s the code that I added to my root level (http://www.sarahdopp.com) .htaccess file (it should all be on one line):

Redirect permanent /blog/xmlsrv/rss2.php http://www.sarahdopp.com/blog/?feed=rss2&

In this example, “/blog/xmlsrv/rss2.php” is the path of my old RSS feed, and “/blog/?feed=rss2&” is the path of my new RSS feed. You need the “Redirect permanent” at the beginning to make it work. See it in action. This is the link to my old feed:

http://www.sarahdopp.com/blog/xmlsrv/rss2.php

Check the address bar after you click the link. You’re at my new feed. Voila!

If you’ve never edited your .htaccess file, it’s not as scary as it sounds. It’s just a text file with a funny file extension that controls some key things about your website. Some people have trouble opening the file because of its strange file name, so here’s a trick (note: you have to be comfortable with FTP to do this):

1. Using your FTP client, find the .htaccess file on your webserver and rename it to htaccess.txt.
2. Download the file.
3. Open it in the code editor of your choice.
4. Make the changes you want to make (see above) and save it.
5. Upload it to your website.
6. Change the filename back to .htaccess.
7. Done.

So now, everybody who was reading my old blog can now see my new blog, as though nothing changed.  Well, they’re probably a little confused because I disappeared for awhile, and their aggregators may now be reloading new copies all my stuff, but hey.  Close enough.

I’ve been involved in the secret beta testing for Squidoo — the latest and greatest Web 2.0 project, spearheaded by Seth Godin. But I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, or they would kill me… at least until today. What the Heck is Squidoo?It’s an organized collection of lenses, which are simply webpages devoted to introducing and explaining specific topics–any topics–like an information-based gateway to the web. Think Wikipedia meets Google.Their philosophy? Everyone is an expert on something. Anyone and everyone should build a lens. Their incentive? Cash kickbacks based on how much traffic and affiliate clicks your lenses draw (and you can choose to donate that cash directly to your favorite charity). Their contribution the web? A better, more humanly-maintained way of finding things and learning about them. Give Google a run for their money! Squidoo’s still in beta testing, but it’s public now, so go check it out. Start with a few of my lenses:- Ani Difranco– The Open Source Movement…and then start making your own!

Nick asked some great questions in a comment to my last entry. Since I know more people are looking for these answers, I’ll post my response here. Sarah,I noticed that the Chinese site looks nice and clean like yours. Is that one CSS too?If I was getting ready to work on some old html site but wanted to move it up into xhtml or better, css, do I need to review the html first or just begin learning how to convert it?By the way, should I never list an email on a webpage? When is it safe?Nick  Hi Nick,Actually, you’re the third person to ask me about learning XHTML this month. XHTML is definitely the way to go, but most tutorials on the web assume you already know HTML (because most of XHTML is HTML. It just has more rules). I wrote an XHTML tutorial for beginners over the summer, but haven’t put it on the web yet (thanks for reminding me that I should). I’ll email it to you if you’d like. Otherwise, yeah, you probably need to start with HTML.CSS resources, on the other hand, are plentiful. Have you been to CSS Zen Garden yet? It’s mostly a just-for-fun site, showing off how extremely versatile CSS can be. But you can also copy their techniques and incorporate them into your work.Most sites (like this one and newsinchinese.com) use a combo of CSS and XHTML or HTML. Some people use CSS for the layout of the site (like making columns), and some people just use it for the visual style (fonts, colors, etc). Either way, it needs to sit in an XHTML or HTML framework.If you’re writing the code from scratch, I’d recommend using XHTML for your layout because CSS layout can be quirky on some browsers. But if you’ve found a template that someone’s spent some time making stable with some intense CSS, go for it. Either way, you should definitely use CSS for your fonts and colors.So basically, you have to learn a bit of everything: HTML, XHTML, and CSS. But they build on each other, and it makes a lot more sense once you get rolling. Start with tutorials and you’ll build up an understanding quickly.Your other question: Should I never list an email on a webpage? When is it safe?Here’s the thing. If the webpage is indexed by Google, you can pretty much guarantee that at some point, that email address will get picked up by some robot email collector and put you on a spam list (or a hundred). A lot of people now obscure their email addresses by putting them in a different format, for example: sarah [at] sarahdopp [dot] com. But that’s a pain for readers to have to translate into a real email address, so it’s a catch-22. I’ve also seen people present their email addresses in graphics. They’re displayed correctly, but a reader can’t copy-paste them. If making it easy on people is your priority and you can suck up some spam, just list the email address. If you’d like to stay on the spam-free side of life and your audience is fairly tech-savvy, go with cryptic. But either way, you should offer an email address on your website. People need to email you!Good luck! And let me know how else I can help.Sarah