I managed to reimplement the various redirects for my old Manila CMS’ URLs over the weekend. I did so by moving my site into a subverted in my Site5 hosting account, and then using some mod_rewrite trickery to direct my domain to that subdirectory. Meanwhile, I put the redirects in the same .htaccess that is used to point my domain to the subdirectory.
Somehow, this separation of the redirects from the Drupal .htaccess file did the trick. I guess it just works more closely to what I’d been doing within the VirtualHost directives on my old server, which I ran myself.
Interestingly, Site5 gave me 55 domain pointers that I can use to direct any domain I own to a subfolder within my document root. Any domain, that is, except the first one … the one I used when I set up the account. This just seems like a silly limitation.
Along the way towards this solution, I found the following to be handy:
This has certainly made a difference; the stats for my “temporarily unavailable” page are jumping again. Sigh.