Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, has been quoted repeatedly expressing his distaste with the excessive price his record company charges his fans for his music.

Having discovered that his album was higher priced than many other new releases this summer he questioned the reason for this. The executive told him that it was because he had an established fan base. Loyal fans will pay any price for new releases by an artist they love.

At a recent gig captured by a Youtube user Trent had this to say:

“My record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them. I called them out for being greedy fucking assholes.”

“Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means - STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin’. Because one way or another these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they’re ripping people off and that’s not right.”

A rather nifty little (well, rather large, actually) plugin for the Firefox browser that facilitates faster blogging is Scribefire. A small icon resides in the status bar which, when clicked, opens a panel from which you can write and submit your post.

It’s quite useful.

Here’s a simple change to include the Wordpress sidebar on all single post pages

Edit the “single.php” template.

Change this line at the top:

<div id="content" class="widecolumn">

To this:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

and to the bottom of the file, add:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

above the similar call for the footer.

That’s it.

You can also make this change to the other pages that display without a sidebar by default.

Here’s a few quick and easy changes you can make to your fresh Wordpress installation to help improve future search engine ranking results.

1. Setup Permalink Structure
note: Only change this option if your install is new - breaking old permalinks would be silly.
It’s a well known fact that including relevant keywords in your page URL can improve search engine rankings for those terms. In Wordpress under “Options” and “Permalinks” there are a number of default options to choose from to enable these “search engine friendly” URLs. Personally, I choose to remove the date from the structure, but your specific formatting is up to you and will probably make little difference. The important part is to include /%postname%/ in the URL to make your post title part of the path to the page.

2. Reverse Default Title Order
By default the title of your blog will appear first followed by the post title between the <title> </title> tags. This is the string shown at the top of your browser window and in tabs if you’re using a browser that supports them. Reversing the code in your “header.php” template to display the blog post title first not only makes it easier to work out what each specific page is about in search results and when open in tabs but can also help improve search engine positions for relevant search terms.

The code to change is between the title html tags in header.php:
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>

Changing it the following should do the trick:
<?php if ( is_single() ) { wp_title(''); ?> | <?php } bloginfo('name'); ?>

3. Use descriptive “title” and “alt” attributes when entering links and images
Search engines thrive on keywords. Each attribute you skip is a missed opportunity to increase your keyword density and thus increase your rankings. Assuming search engine results are what you’re after.

4. Create a Sitemap
Google offers the opportunity to submit a sitemap for your site to enable the spiders to better understand your pages. There’s a nifty sitemap plugin for Wordpress that enables you to generate this effortlessly. Why not?

5. Enable Pinging of update services
By default Wordpress will notify http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ whenever you post to your blog. This notifies various sites about your new post and encourages indexing in search engines and blog indexing sites. There are many additional services which you can find listed in the extensive update service list in the Wordpress Codex. Add these to the “update services” list under “Options” and “Writing”.

Ah… yes. A ‘blog’ of sorts. Everyday millions contribute their thoughts to their own little corner of the interwebs. Here I’ll do my bit to add to the background noise.

I’m running the latest beta (2.3) wordpress edition which, amongst other things, has built in support for tags. Fabulous.

Jello world.