Redirecting Old Site Pages to New WordPress Site

Do you know how many sites link to your old sites' pages? Is your site referenced in Wikipedia? Do you want to keep your old site's search rankings? Then you'll probably want to do a 301 (permanent) Redirect. You do this by creating or editing your site's .htaccess file.

Your WordPress site probably already has a .htaccess file. I copied mine to my local machine and underneath this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

I followed this guide and added this below:

redirect 301 /chapters.htm http://www.pnwpga.com/chapters

... etc. until I'd included all the important pages from the old site and their new equivalents (one on each line).

I uploaded the new .htaccess file and saved it over the existing one in my site's root folder. All the redirects are working perfectly! Now I don't have to worry about breaking links on external sites or losing pnwpga.com's good search rankings.

Best CSS Resources Part I

There are some resources on the web that I come to again and again for CSS reference. I'm going to list my favorites here. Hopefully you already have these bookmarked--none are that new. If not, here's a chance to add these to your list of resources.

1. AlsaCreations: http://www.alsacreations.com
This site is in French, but a lot of articles and tutorials are also translated into English. Here is where I first learned hack-free CSS-driven menus that work in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

2. Dead Centre: http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/thebox/deadcentre4.html
Positioning in CSS was somewhat of a mystery to me until I found this website. The simple working diagram was one big "aha!" moment for me.

3. Accessible CSS Forms: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/forms
Even when I had freed myself from using tables for layout design, I was still relying on tables to format my forms. After viewing this site, I now have no excuse to use tables anymore for anything other than data.

4. CSS Zen Garden: http://www.csszengarden.com
Beautiful examples of how versatile CSS-driven layouts can be.

5. Equal Height Columns Using CSS: http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/61
This blog article changed my life. Finally, equal height columns without any tables or JavaScript.

6. Maximum and Minimum Height and Width in IE: http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/01/16/maximum-and-minimum-height-and-width-in-internet-explorer
This Perishable Press article is a great way to get around issues in IE without resorting to JavaScript.

These are the six sites or articles that taught me the most about creating valid, CSS-driven sites. If you don't have them bookmarked yet (I do on Delicious), what are you waiting for?