301 redirect from old blog location to new blog location...

[renegade]

I've moved my blog and would like to inform search engines and spiders to find the new blog and pass the PR from the old pages to the new pages.
AIUI I need to create an .htaccess file in the domain root which I have done, it doesn't work (i.e. if I enter an old URL it displays the old page (which still exists) and does not redirect to new page).
The .htaccess file contains:

---
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^cantbarsed.com/blog/ [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://blog.cantbarsed.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
---

Do I need to remove the old pages before it will work or is the code wrong?
Any help gratefully received.

[Kandevil]

Do I need to remove the old pages before it will work or is the code wrong?

Hope the tan isn't fading too fast Joe. You don't need to remove the old pages, if it is correct it will happen if they are there or not. I'll have a look at the code soon, if somebody doesn't beat me to it.

[Kandevil]

there are prettier ways of doing it, but this should work:

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /blog http://blog.cantbarsed.com
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.cantbarsed.com/$1

that needs to go in your root's .htaccess file

[renegade]

Thanks for that Ian, much appreciated.
It needed a bit of further tweaking (my programmer mate took a look - he fell down the stairs over the weekend and is just out of hospital - I think he's still a bit "punchy" because I'm not convinced it's 100% sorted but it's doing something):

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /blog http://blog.cantbarsed.com
#RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.htm)$ http://blog.cantbarsed.com/$1.html
RewriteRule ^blog/(.+)\.htm$ http://blog.cantbarsed.com/$1.html [R=301,NC]