After much struggle and more than a reasonable amount of shouting “This is exactly what everyone else did, why won’t you do it too?” at my .htaccess file, I have successfully (it appears) migrated my RSS feeds to Wordpress from Movable Type.

However, it was a complete hack.   Here’s what I did:

1. I tried to modify the .htaccess file on my own.
2. I tried to modify the .htaccess file using this guide on RewriteRule (and this one too).
3. I tried to modify the .htaccess file using this guide on migrating from Movable Type to Wordpress
4. But none of them worked.  Not even the last one.

So eventually I came up with a completely different approach.  using wget, I created a cron job to retrieve the RSS feeds in RDF,RSS2 and Atom format every 15 minutes, and physically put them where the old files were.

Here’s an example line in my crontab:

*/15 * * * *    wget -q http://www.undefined.com/ia/index.php?feed=rdf -O ~/path/to/ia/index.rdf

(Quietly run wget and fetch the specified URL, outputing the resulting content in a file called index.rdf in the specified directory.)

Bloglines seems happy with it, so I’m going to call it a win and keep going.