By default, WordPress displays the name of your blog first in the HTML “title” element. That’s not good for search engines or TrackBacks because it obfuscates the title of your post or page, which is what people (and Google) are really interested. There are at least two existing plugins that address this—SEO Title Tag and Optimal Title—but it’s really not that hard to do yourself, provided you’re not afraid of a little PHP.

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I was going to write today about how I’ve improved on my previous solution for manipulating the category URIs in WordPress, but then I came across the Top Level Categories plugin that does exactly what I’ve been trying to accomplish without all of my half-assed hackery. Moreover, it’s compatible with the Permalink Redirect plugin, which my approaches weren’t. A big thanks to the authors of these two plugins for making my life that much easier.

I’m planning some changes for my website for the upcoming release of WordPress 2.1. Basically, I want to start using WordPress as a content management system instead of a plain old blogging tool, and the new version can handle that a bit better than the current one, 2.0.5. But I also want to do some tricky things with where different types fo contrent are stored, and that means delving into WordPress’s internals, including its mod_rewrite rules. It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally managed to get it working.

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