Help needed redirecting old urls .htaccess/ReWriteRule

I’m trying to redirect my old blogware urls to my new WP blog that I’m setting up on a temporary site until I get the redirect sorted. I’ve wasted 4 hours and i’m not getting anywhere so any help appreciated!

I’m trying to setup .htaccess so that it will redirect external links pointing to my old site, to the new corresponding page I’m building on your servers so that I don’t lose any traffic.

The old page structure is:

https://domain/_archives/YYYY/M/D/uniqueref.html

where M and D can be one or two digits depending on the month/day. I want any old url’s to either the new article I’ve imported, or at least to the same post day i.e.

(i) https://domain/YYYY/MM/DD/article title

(ii)https://domain/YYYY/MM/DD

I think (i) will be impossible so I’ve tried to crack (ii) by following these instructions https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2006-May/006337.html and at the moment my .htaccess file reads (my new temp domain is https:// siteground128.com/~connecte):

# Make sure mod_rewrite is ready to go
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# redirect URLs like /blog/_archives/2006/2/23/1780165.html to /2006/2/23/
RewriteRule ^blog/_archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/?https://siteground128.com/~connecte/$1/$2/$3/ [QSA,L]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~connecte/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /~connecte/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Please tell me what I’m doing wrong. Don’t worry about telling me how stupid I am – I’ve got a very thick skin and I’m new to all this.

thanks in advance for any help. Once I get this sorted I’ll be able to move my nameservers over.

Everton