Initially, I installed Wordpress to the /blog directory of my website. After using it a while I decided that I really wanted nothing else at the top level of my website and moved my blog to the top level following the directions here. Things worked just fine after the move except that anyone going to the old blog location http://www.markmorga.com/blog would get the Wordpress header and footer with a 404 error message and no blog.

I played with the .htaccess a bit myself with no luck. What I wanted to do was to have any reference to /blog to be redirected to / but any /blog/… references still go to their destinations. Eventually, I threw the problem over to Anton to have a look at. He poked at it long enough to get angry at Apache and ultimately came up with the following solution:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /

        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/(.+)
        RewriteRule blog/ / [R=301,L]
        RewriteRule blog/feed/ /feed/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Here the first two lines turn on the rewrite engine for the base directory /. The RewriteCond line indicates that these rules won’t apply to URIs that match to /blog/* (where the * is one or more characters), The first RewriteRule rewrites the /blog URI to / and the second RewriteRule redirects the old feed URI to the new /feed location.

Thanks, Anton!