Announcement: New section on the site

If you’ve been keeping up with the posts on slightlymore, you might have guessed that there was a new section appearing on the site. It has now been born, and is called light relief. It’s intended to be a place where I can put the every day bits and pieces which I find and would like to post for the rest of the world to see. I didn’t feel that the belonged on the website before, and it was quite disappointing and annoying.

So roll on down and have a look. As mentioned in the previous announcement – I’ve set up an RSS feed specifically for this section, so if you find that you like what’s on there, please subscribe to have the entrails of my mind appear in your feed reader.

Announcement: RSS reshuffle! Are you subscribed to the correct feed?

I’m currently giving slightlymore a bit of a restructure and have decided to split up the feeds into more sensible chunks. I now offer four feeds for your pleasure:

• Everything – this includes posts by me, external links, frequently googled questions and a new light relief section. If you subscribed to my feed before 20th June 2009, this will be the one you are subscribed to. The only difference you’ll notice is the new light relief section.
• Just the blog posts – this pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. It will provide only content which has been written by me.
• Just the links – this will give you the links off to other websites which I often post. This feed will be very useful for sparks if you’ve got Shaun Inman’s new RSS reader – Fever.
• Just the light relief – will provide you with only the content from the light relief section. This will include jokes, youtube clips, funny pictures and other entertaining thingies and wotsits.

Don’t leave post slugs as the default

This post is mainly aimed towards Wordpress, Textpattern and (probably) a multitude of other CMS driven website users. ‘Smart’ web software will automatically create a ’slug’ for your new article, but it’s not always best to trust the CMS to come up with the best URL for you.

Oh, by the way, a slug is a part of the URL which uniquely identifies a post in a CMS. For example, in the URL http://www.example.com/blog/my-new-post, the slug is my-new-post

The rant

Take my new FGQ – What does the -= operator do?. Auto-slug-generators will (mostly) create the slug what-does-the-operator-do – which I’m sure you’ll agree is not too useful. Firstly, it would be difficult from a user’s point of view to remember which characters to remove and add in to the URL, but secondly, from an SEO point of view, it’s not terribly descriptive. Thirdly, if I then wrote an article with the title what does the += operator do – wordpress would create a very similar slug.

The point

Most, if not all, CMS systems allow you to change the slug of the post or article. Most of them also automatically create one for you. I am making the point that the automatically created slug is not always the best. When you create a new post, take a moment to think about what you’re trying to say, how people might search for it, and optimise for both. For example, this post is called Don’t leave post slugs as the default, but I have decided that the best way to describe it SEO-wise is post-slug-optimisation. It’s a minor thing, but it can make all the difference between being on the first or second page on google.

I’m upgrading to Wordpress 2.8

It’s always a good idea to keep all software on your website up-to-date, and for that reason I have just upgraded slightlymore to run Wordpress 2.8 (previously 2.7.0). Having said that, it’s still in the beta stage, so there might well be a multitude of bugs in it. I am a believer in open source and want to help to make wordpress better and more secure, and in fact that was my main reason for upgrading before the official stable release – so if you find any weirdies on the site, do let me know.

You can also upgrade by visiting the wordpress development blog.