Wordpress "Import HTML Pages" Plugin Help! (.Htaccess Problem)

I Got this plugin called Import HTML Pages.
On My Server I Have Wordpress Installed Here
/mydomain/htdocs/(wordpress is here)/
i created a directory called articles to store all my html articles which i want to import
/mydomain/htdocs/articles/(all HTML HERE)

then in the plugin it asks me "This should be a full path from the server root, on the same server where WordPress is running now."
so i put /articles/
when i ask it to import
this is what i get
.htaccess Redirects

if you need to redirect visitors from the old file locations to your new WordPress pages, copy these redirects into your .htaccess file above the WordPress rules. Note: You might need to search & replace first if your import root directory was not the same as your web root. Also, if you imported many files, the complete list of redirects might slow your web server's performance. Consider copying only essential ones, or if there's a pattern to your file or directory names, create a RewriteRule instead.

Click to expand...

Im Not Much Of An Expert In Htaccess.

surely the full server path is /mydomain/htdocs/articles/ and not just /articles/

I tried it with the full path....the same error came up

surely that text is only talking about how to redirect the old static html pages to the new wp pages? if you dont have the old static pages indexed then you wont need to worry about it.

if you do then you could use something like this line to redirect one of them:

RewriteRule ^articles/foobar.html$ /blog/this-is-the-new-page/ [L,R=301]

or whatever the old and new page urls look like:

much easier if you can work out the new wp url from the static html once so something like this:

RewriteRule ^articles/(.*).html$ /blog/$1/ [L,R=301]

would 301 any page like /articles/fish.html to /blog/fish/

another quick note....

if you need to do anything more programatically to work out what the new url should be (like maybe using a lookup list or something) i tend to do an internal rewrite to a perl or php script like:

RewriteRule ^articles/$ /redirect.php

and then use that redirect.php script to work out the target url and then issue a 301 http header itself. also much cleaner/efficient than using some wp plugin - if you care about your server load etc.