In my quest for good Google ratings and an effective permalink structure, I have come across some good SEO tips specific to Wordpress. They are all pretty easy to implement, but could potentially be quite effective. I have also found a post about general blog search engine optimisation. Most of them focus around using effective post titles, permalink structures and good content.

Been trying a bit today to update the permalinks for my blog. Instead of each post being linked to by something like index.php/?p=200 I want it to look like /blog/year/month/day so it is a bit friendlier. I’ve just recompiled apache to enable mod_rewrite but haven’t managed to work out how to put the rewrite rules into the .htaccess file yet, never having used it before. I’ll have to leave it till sometime after Christmas when I’ve got more time to read through the Wordpress manuals.

Just a short note to say Happy Christmas to all. Hope you have good fun, drink plenty booze and eat loads of yummy food.

Here’s a Christmas song to get you in the mood, recorded by my brother and his friends.

Finished Uni for Christmas yesterday. Officially the term doesn’t end until Friday, but there is only one lecture on Thursday as the rest of the courses have finished, so there’s no point going for one lecture really and I have Fridays off anyway. I’m going to spend the rest of the week doing not very much before I have to make a start on the pile of work I have to do for next year.

Less than two weeks left ’till Christmas! I haven’t done any shopping whatsoever. Might get round to it eventually.

Went to the snowdome this afternoon with my brother to make sure we can still ski before we go to Austria next April. We’ve been waiting for a chance to go for a while to get the cheap deal - it cost me £15 for two hours on the slope, including ski hire on student prices. Not having done any skiing for some five years I started off slowly and only went part way up and after a few runs was going the whole length. Great fun!

It must be like riding a bicycle, because all the movements came back pretty much straight away which was good. It wasn’t too busy either for a friday afternoon so we managed to do several fast runs. Must try and get there again very soon, its real good fun!

Just thought I’d alert everyone to the fact that the latest version of openSUSE is due to be released this Thursday for download. SUSE is my favourite linux distribution for desktops, and I’m finding myself using it more and more because of the numerous advantages it offers over Windows.

From the OpenSUSE website: The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides free and easy access to openSUSE. Here you will find a community of users and developers, who all have the same goal in mind - to create and distribute the world’s most usable Linux.

Just two weeks left till I finish uni for Christmas now. Getting scarily close. Unfortunately, Christmas isn’t going to be much of a rest though as I have quite a bit of work to be getting on with: 2 business essays, one of which is a group project, 3 assessed worksheets and my major research project. Hmmm.

According to the BBC, smoking in enclosed public places will be banned in England from 1 July next year. In my opinion, this is excellent news. Why it couldn’t have been implemented earlier, I don’t know. How well it will be enforced is yet to be seen. I imagine there will still be the occasional few people who flout the rules and light up in public, hopefully these will be a minimum.

I’ve just been playing and have managed to implement the photo gallery into the rest of the website. It should work with all browsers, but if you browse to the gallery without maximising your browser window, it could look strange due to a restriction in the coppermine software. Due to the way the template for the gallery works, it will take a lot more work to put the random photos in the top left into the page - might get round to it at some point.

If you have any problems or it looks weird in any way, let me know!

It’s the end of week 8 today. All is still going well, but the work is starting to mount up. On the Chemistry side, it’s mostly assessed worksheets which contribute altogether 25% towards each module, and on the Business side I have a group project to work on and another essay that will wait till over Christmas. Oh, and there’s all the day-to-day work to keep on top of too. Only 3 weeks left now!

Have a good weekend.