I have been using forums lately to keep up with the latest trends and industry news. I find them a very valuable resource, what I don’t like about them is the unclean / non-seo URLs. I’ve noticed there is a script out there called vbSEO which is built for the vbulletin software. I find this script quiet amazing as it fixes all the URLs on the site to make them clean and optimized.

I took it upon myself to try and create something simular for phpBB. I’m sure a lot of you are telling me there are hundreds already out there, but I ask you this, how will I learn if I just download a simple plug in script?

Feel free to track how I’m going by visiting http://thecoder.com.au/phpbb_seo/

So far I’m going pretty well, I have a heap of links that still need some converting and a few little bugs here and there but it should work out pretty well once its completed.

I’ve done a little bit of work on the coder site today. Most of you won’t notice the change at all as it is very minor, I have simply made it so that whenever someone tries to visit http://www.thecoder.com.au/ it will redirect them to http://thecoder.com.au/. I did this because its a good SEO technique, I also made some other small changes, as you may have discovered my site runs off virtual directories and if you went to a page such as http://thecoder.com.au/library/php it woudl take you to the php category page. I have slightly changed this so that all links now have a trailing / on the end, this means if you visit http://thecoder.com.au/library/php it will redirect you to http://thecoder.com.au/php/. This was also done to help optomise the site for search engines, and also because I thought it made the site look a little nicer.

The other thing I’ve done is pretty small, I’ve fixed the comment area. It wasn’t correctly storing the username of the poster so therefore it looked as if all comments were made by ‘mick’ this has now been fixed, if you are logged in make a comment it will list your username as the poster.

You may have noticed a few small changes in theCoder website. We have just launched a brand new FREE directory that can be accessed by clicking the directory link up the top of this page.

At the moment the directory is completely free, although once the climb the search engine ladders we are going to turn it into a paid one. So jump in now and start submitting those links while its still free.

In other news we have started slowing writing some tutorials, I’m planing at the moment to pop out a tutorial every week so make sure you keep on coming back so you don’t get left behind, and remember if you have any comments or you have your own tutorials that you want to submit feel free to by signing up for an account.

theCoder is currently in development.

The development is taking place on every page so if you spot an error don’t worry it won’t be there for long.

Please check back shortly to see how the site is going.