You may have arrived here by following a link to http://davestevens.co.uk (or by entering that URL in your browser’s address bar, of course). If you have a keen eye, you’ll see that you’re now at http://davestevens.co.uk/blog or a descendant of this sub-directory.

This is achieved via mod_rewrite, an Apache module that lets you specify where the user should be directed when they enter a URL on your site.

When I am browsing around on other blogs and feel compelled to comment, I am often asked to enter my URL. Rather than entering the full link to the blog, I always enter the root URL - http://davestevens.co.uk - so that in future, should I move away from a blog format or perhaps rethink the type of content I am providing here, I won’t have to accommodate set incoming links to a defunct address.

How do you approach this consideration? Can anyone see any potential SEO issues through using this technique?

You may have noticed a new addition to my sidebar today. Unless, of course, this is your first visit to the site - in which case for all you know, it could have been there forever.

Either way, there is a new addition to said sidebar, in the form of Job Listings from Authentic Jobs. These job listings are aimed towards web professionals and in my mind offer a far preferable route to potential employment than your standard call-from-an-agency type affair.

For full disclosure and whatnot, the links to the job listings are provided here through an affiliate scheme, so I do benefit from people finding jobs through the service. However, I have no control over which jobs are shown or the details of those jobs so there is still full impartiality on my part.

Seems like everyone around me is changing roles at the moment, myself included… guess there’s something in the air - recruitment fever!

I’ve made some changes to the site today. Rather than having a twitter area in the top right above the sidebar, I’ve moved to having each tweet appear inline, as they happen. I’ve also started using Pownce recently, so my updates there are also being pulled in to this site inline.

Hopefully this will make things a little more integrated and make for a better experience, but I guess you will be the judge of that-  so feel free to comment with your feedback.

After saying I was going to upgrade to 2.5 it was just a matter of finding the time to do it and at last, today was the day that provided that time. I was pleasantly surprised that all I needed to complete the upgrade process was the Codex Upgrade instructions, phpMyAdmin and an SSH session to my server.

After backing everything up, it took about 10 minutes to ensure I copied everything over correctly without overwriting my heavily customised theme and the plugins I use, then I ran the upgrade script and all was well.

The new editor in “Write Post” is a drastic improvement on the old version, it’s much more simple and better arranged on the page. It also gives you a preview of the permalink you’ll get for your post which I especially like.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I delve further in to it, but on first impressions you can colour me impressed.

Old news in the fast moving world of the blog, of course - but Wordpress 2.5 has been released. It looks to be a big step forward (not that I’ve had many complaints with 2.3) and I intend to run the update soon. Would anyone care to share their 2.5 experiences?