Well, I just burned a Sunday night playing around with WordPress URIs and the .htaccess file. Bottom line, if you adjust your permalink structure in Options>Permalinks, lines are added to the .htaccess file.
The problem I thought I was trying to solve was how to redirect my podcasts feed to a new permalink structure….after much playing around and figuring I’d go through my .htaccess file line by line I eventually deleted a few lines that determined a permalink behavior which I wanted to control.
So, now my old feed links work, but my category links give 404s, which isn’t bothering me all that much. I should really look into getting a tagging structure going on here anyway.
Update: the podcasts feed at the old URL structure is broken http://cleverhack.com/archives/category/podcasts/feed/ and any redirect for it is currently failing. However, the new podcasts feed at http://cleverhack.com/category/podcasts/feed/ works just fine.
Update 2: Upgraded to the newest version of podpress 6.3, which seems to have improved the situation and most importantly changed my itunes feed URL. Still working on redirecting the old feed URL - I’m trying all sorts of things and getting myriad 404s, etc.
Update 3: For cryin’ out loud, the following redirectmatch works and gives the desired 301, but only after way too much messing around…what I missed in a way too obvious “your missing glasses are sitting on your head” kind of way was that I needed the ?$ wildcards after the initial file declaration. And now my podcasts feeds are redirected.
RedirectMatch permanent ^/archives/category/podcasts/feed/?$ http://cleverhack.com/category/podcasts/feed/