If you want to enable wordpress’ permalinks, it’s actually quite simple. Instead of displaying:

http://birdchan.com/home/?p=2034

you can have it displayed as:

http://birdchan.com/home/2011/05/25/mod-rewrite/

Picking the permalink format in the wordpress admin page is quite easy. The part that is a little tricky is on the server. Here are the steps:

1. If you have done it right, the .htaccess in your wordpress directory should look something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /home/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /home/index.php [L]

2. Then check your apache conf file. I am using ubuntu apache2 so your mileage may vary. Make sure you see the following settings enabled in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

       Options FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride All
       ...

3. Then restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart