Moving? Redirect with htaccess and 301

Image Credit: Shannon K on Flickr

If you’ve ever moved your site from one server to another, or changed domain names you know how difficult it can be to redirect all your old traffic to the new location. Here’s a quick trick to make the transition totally seamless.

Redirect 301 / http://kdmurray.net/

This will redirect every URL beneath the root (” / “) to it’s corresponding URL at mynewsite.net. So if you had a blog post from a couple of years ago that you migrated to the new domain, you can redirect the old URLs (which may have been cached in a search engine) to the new site to drive all that traffic to where it should be going.

In addition the 301 code (see HTTP 301) will tell web browsers & search engines that the page has been permanently moved which will help to ensure that the old site is no longer cached.

This should work with Apache on both Linux (OS X, unix etc.) and Windows.

Aussie Geek Podcast Receives Podcast Bunker Award

This past week the AGP received an award from the folks at the Podcast Bunker for its high-quality audio production.

For those who have listened to the show you’re already aware of the high-standard that the show’s founder Dave Gray sets for the show.

I take a note of personal pride in this as well having produced about a third of the episodes of the AGP since the relaunch last summer.

Here’s a link to Dave’s thoughts on the award too. We’re all very happy to have received the award and are looking forward to another great year of The Geek.

Multiple RSS Feeds with DualFeeds

I’m a huge fan of bloggers (and podcasters and well… everyone else for that matter) using full feeds for subscribers to their sites. I’ve got no time for people who demand that I hit their website to be able to read the content. If you want to monetize the feed that’s fine, but let me read it where I want.

That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net. The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.

The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.

The solution? Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter). The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries. This is a very elegant solution to the problem. Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.

Technically the plugin works very well. I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds. Works like a charm.

Steve Jobs’ Health is None of Your Business

Steve Jobs announced yesterday, in an email to Apple employees, that he would be taking a medical leave of absence from his day-to-day duties as CEO of Apple to focus on a significant health issue. Jobs has provided significant leadership the company helping to guide it from near failure to a worldwide leader in consumer electronics, making him arguably the most key employee at the tech giant.

As a result of the perception that Apple == Steve Jobs there is some concern over the fate of the all things “i” maker that the company will suffer in Jobs’ absence. There are even some (yes I’m talking to you Lee Gomes) who seem to feel that Jobs’ health should be a matter of public record.

In my decidedly humble opinion (I love having a blog) the drop in Apple’s stock price shows one major flaw about Apple’s strategy for succession planning for senior executives: nobody knows they have one.

Every time that Jobs so much as sneezes, the markets sell off the stock amid fears that the company won’t succeed without Jobs at the helm. Admittedly they didn’t do too well the last time Jobs was ousted and forced to watch as the company he founded withered on the vine but the company was also a much smaller player back then with a less secure plan for the future.

I have no doubt that Jobs has learned from that early mistake and no doubt has a plan in place for who will succeed him as CEO, which at this stage would appear to be mild-mannered COO Tim Cook.

Unlike Mr. Gomes in his Forbes piece, I don’t think that any employee’s health information should be a matter of public record. I don’t care how sick Steve Jobs is, he isn’t bound to share that personal medical information with the world at large unless he’s damned good and ready.

At what point would you draw the line? CEOs? Executive leaders? All management? Maybe the line is based on illness, only terminal illnesses? Serious problems requiring a leave of absence?

Stock prices are driven as much by emotions as they are by market forces. Hell, the emotions of investors are essentially a market force in and of themselves. If the investors don’t feel comfortable about Apple’s future then Apple needs to do something about that. I suggest letting people know that there’s a solid plan in place for succession of all key members of the leadership team. You do have one, right Steve? Get well soon.

Thanks to Mac OS Ken for providing balanced coverage of the issue on the January 15th show.

Learning by Disaster

I was reading an article on Raymond Chen’s blog today really made me think. The story, for those who don’t care to read it, essentially is about a service (shell.windows.com) which was created by a Microsoft developer as a proof of concept. He ran it off a computer under his desk at first and that’s where it sat… until it stopped working one day. Now that service is run on proper infrastructure in a Microsoft data centre.

In the industry I’m in, this story really hits home. It’s very common for us to make decisions based on the short-term, tools which we don’t expect to be around for a long period of time. We should have learned over that this kind of “short-term gain” strategy almost always leads to long-term pain.

The lesson: Take some time to make sure that tools you build can be left unattended even after the cleaning crew vacuums under your desk.

The Solution Spiral

A mentor of mine in my early working years taught me a whole lot of very valuable lessons that have served me well, and that I’ve tried to carry forward as we bring new folks on to the team. This is one of those lessons.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of being confronted with a problem in either our personal or professional lives where we’ve needed to devise a solution. Your first instinct is often close to the truth, particularly when the problem is in an arena that you are familiar with. The key lies in the first steps you take to refine the solution: will you solve the problem or lead yourself down the solution spiral?

When we propose a solution to a problem, particularly in a group setting, humans have the tendency to get attached to that solution. As people try to help refine the proposed solution and question it we have a tendency to get defensive and force changes to your idea to plug the holes that other people are trying to poke in your idea.

p style=”text-align: center;”> Image credit xkcd

The key is being able to step back and look over the situation. Find the simple solution. Look at what you want to solve, and see if there’s a way to solve the problem quickly and easily. If you need to get from Vancouver to Los Angeles there’s many routes you can take. The best choice isn’t likely to travel by way of Boston.

The lesson: Find the solution that most closely resembles the solution you’re trying to solve.

Thanks to the FOG for this invaluable lesson.

iTunes goes DRM Free

It has finally happened! iTunes has gone DRM free for all its tracks from Sony-BMG, EMI, Warner Music and Universal Music as well as several independent labels. This news is a huge nail in the coffin for DRM as a whole.

The announcement, made by Apple’s Chief Marketing exec Phil Schiller at the keynote for the 2009 Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The changes to iTunes also include a change in the iTunes pricing model. Tracks in iTunes will start to appear at three different price points depending on what the labels want to charge for the tracks. The price points will be $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29. This is a significant departure from the “one-size-fits-all” model that Apple has used in the past.

Some people are complaining that the DRM free tracks rely on Apple’s AAC format which means that they’re less compatible than more widely used formats like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. But at the same time now that the format is no longer DRM protected, there’s nothing stopping other companies from supporting AAC on their media players.

So good for Apple. Good for the labels. And goodbye and good riddance to DRM.

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