Spontaneous Monotony

The blog now validates as said web standard (as opposed to the less-demanding XHTML 1.0 Transitional it was before). I had great fun manually editing every single post to remove target=”“ attributes from all the links, but if you spot any that I’ve missed (or if a page doesn’t validate) then please contact me using the form.

At one point I had the blog validating as XHTML 1.1, but because non-Transitional XHTML (ie 1.1 and 1.0 Strict) doesn’t support the ‘align’ attribute, the current theme is buggered without Transitional.

On discovering that my server does indeed have mod_rewrite (didn’t have time to look before) I have now changed the permalink structure within the blog. The new format (/year/month/date/post-slug) gives much more information about the post than the old one (a question mark followed by a number), which apparently is not very well liked by search engines.

Thanks to Wordpress’ brilliance, it doesn’t even break the old structure: any old-structure links (e.g. in trackbacks I sent to other sites) will still work perfectly, but the site itself will now display, use (and send, via trackbacks/pingbacks) the new format.

EDIT: You can also use this to access yearly, monthly and daily archives. Simply remove the section that you do not want from a permalink. For example to view the archive for 31st May 2005, go to http://www.davidarussell.co.uk/2005/05/31 .

Given that .eu is the second-biggest group of visitors to the site (USA first, UK third, small groups of specific EU countries further down the list) I had attempted to install an Altavista translator box earlier, but half of the languages didn’t work so I had to kill it. If anyone knows of any easy-to-use translation scripts (or better yet a Wordpress plugin) please drop me a line!

The skin on my right thumb is worryingly solid after five and a half hours of exams today, so I’ll keep this brief. I’ve changed the plugins around a bit which will affect the comments system in the following ways:

• Nofollow is now completely gone. I never liked it in the first place (I have better things to do with my bandwidth than fix Google’s broken algorithm for them), and now that I have a significant number of anti-spam plugins I don’t even need the temporary (7 day) nofollow that I had set via the Dofollow plugin
• EDIT: Commenters will now get access to the same ‘quicktags’ bar that I get when writing posts. You could always use these by typing them in manually, but you had to know what they were, whereas you can now (for example) highlight the text you want to make bold, and click the STR buttonEND EDIT

Happy commenting (or not, as the case may be)

I’ve added a Firefox Search Plugin to the blog. You can now add Spontaneous Monotony to your Firefox search box (this link will also appear at the bottom of the search results page). Rather than loading the site’s homepage, then searching from the sidebar (which doesn’t appear on some pages such as single posts), you will be able to select Spontaneous Monotony in the search tool at the top right of your Firefox window. It might also work in the Mozilla Suite (no guarantees, because the sidebar support is dodgy) and should work in Netscape 8 (which after all is just AOL’s bastardised version of Firefox 1.0.3) .

IE users (still 45.3% of you according to awStats, compared to 30.3% for Firefox) need not fear, as the search box isn’t going anywhere. I just thought I’d make things a bit more convenient for Firefox users.