I have now upgraded this weblog to Blosxom 2.0 RC5. I found myself hacking up the Perl code in an older version to do precisely what some Blosxom 2 plugins have been able to do for some time. I have yet to use any plugins which would be obvious to readers of this weblog, however.

One change I did make was add a new template flavour so that individual weblog entries are rendered alone in their own page with the title of the post appearing in the title of the web page. The resulting URLs make much more sense than the original date-based ones. After all, when viewing the URL few will care when the post was made, but most will probably care what the post is about. A few Apache RewriteRule trickeries later, and nobody is the wiser. It will be interesting to see how having the title of a post in the title element of the HTML changes my Google ranking for certain searchin terms.

Speaking of using HTML properly, I wish I could lucidly explain how to make advantageous use of valid HTML without degenerating into a frothy, rabid mass spewing forth rants on semantic markup, the separation of content and style, and the importance of using proper names, titles and sensible URLs. Restructuring our company website so that it conforms to an HTML standard and makes use of semantic HTML should make it more accessible to search engines and so increase its search ranking. I routinely see this weblog rank higher than definitive web pages for certain search terms, so I must be doing something right. The trouble is, our web guy is of the DreamWeaver school, so I wouldn’t even know where to start. Perhaps when I have some spare time I will take a look at a couple of our existing HTML pages and see how they could be improved.