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!