As you can tell from looking around, this site was featured on Extreme Makeover: Blog Edition last night. Not really, but a lot of stuff changed while most of you were sleeping.
The most obvious difference is the layout. I had been working on replacing the default WordPress theme for a while, but then I came across Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme. It’s very clean and minimal, just like my own design that’s still in development, and I think it looks pretty sharp. I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes, but my feeling at this point is that anything is better than the tired-looking blue default theme.
Another important change has to do with site URLs and search engine optimization (SEO). You might have noticed that permanent links for posts now end in .html and include the title of the post. This will help search engines rank and index my content since relevant words are now contained in the URL itself. An additional benefit is that I can easily switch to static pages if I need to reduce server load quickly (Digg or Slashdot). Old links containing only the post ID should continue to work just fine.
Thanks to the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, I now have an accurate Sitemap-compliant sitemap containing a listing of all content generated by WordPress. My sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files are recreated every day around midnight, and I configured Google Webmaster Tools to pick up on that and take care of it.
Finally, WordPress 2.7 was officially released yesterday, and I upgraded right away after having tested both RC1 and RC2. The most visible new change is the admin interface/dashboard, and they really did a great job with it. While poking around, I noticed some new configuration options as well, and one of them directly affects how comments work on this site.
There is now a 21-day commenting window on all posts that allow comments (which should be all of them). I like this change a lot because it will prevent people from resurrecting posts with discussions that have been dead for months. An added benefit is that spam should go down since there will never be more than a handful of posts available to comment on. So, if you have something to say, make sure you say it within three weeks of the original post date!
Oh, and one more minor thing: I posted my email address on the About Me page and I’m keeping it safe from spammers with the help of reCAPTCHA. If you need to get in touch, head over there to contact me. It’s a pretty cool system, and I might move to reCAPTCHA for comment validation in the future.
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Definitely and improvement over the default template.
I used a template very similar to this one – http://nico.berlee.nl/ajaxberlee-13-wordpress-theme/#/ I liked it a lot but ended up dropping it. It’s heavy use of AJAX cause many plugins to not be compatible with it, and WP is all about the plugins. This theme looks a bit more stable than the one I was using.
Glad your learning a bit about SEO and implementing some changes that will help you in the long run.