Blogging Resources

11 ultimate resources to help you become WordPress champ!

19 Feb, 2010 | mayank

One of the core reason for the popularity of WordPress is the community around it. There are thousands of fans and supporters who have created free wordpress themes, free wordpress plugins and most importantly thousands of tutorials, documentations to make it simpler for you to understand and use WordPress! A simple search will ensure that you’d get answer to most of you problems, so we though of listing the best resources about WordPress for you – don’t forget to subscribe them in your feed reader!

Official Channel for news & updates about WordPress

1. WordPress Development blog – Official blog about the latest development happening around WordPress open-source application.
2. Latest news about WordPress.com – Official blog about the latest happenings around WordPress.com (i.e. the hosted service).
3. Planet WordPress – An aggregator of some of the handpicked blogs by the Automattic team. It aggregates posts from various blogs owned by Automattic, core WordPress developers and some community blogs.

Blogs from WordPress community

1. Weblog Tools Collection

A multi-author blog that has been delivering high quality content from long time now. The focus of the blog is to talk about tools that help bloggers in running their blogs. It mostly covers plugins, themes and tools related to WordPress since WordPress has become the synonym for “best blogging software”.

2. Pro Blog Design

Another multi-author blog that has been getting extremely popular and has a thriving community around itself. This blog publishes lots of WordPress related articles. Although, its just not about WordPress. This blog also tells you that how you can design a better blog yourself. There are various resourceful posts that ensure that you will always pointed to the best of the best stuff!

3. Cats Who Code

A blog by Jean-Baptiste Jung that features super quality posts every now and then. Blog’s primary focus is web development, however it features posts on WordPress more than often. The blog is so good that it is part of Smashing Network and I’m sure a quick look by you at the content quality will convince you to include it in your feed reader. You may also want to follow WP Recipes, a WordPress focused blog by the same person.

4. WPHacks

Unfortunately, this blog hasn’t been updated since December 2010. However, it has got some of the best WordPress hacks that you’d ever come across. We even designed and customized this WordPress based blog with Kyle Eslick, owner of WPHacks. In simple words, WPHacks’ archive is a true gold mine when it comes to WordPress.

5. WPscoop & WPVote.

WPscoop & WPVote are digg like services for WordPress related stuff. If you have a blog that is about WordPress or if you have written a tutorial, hack or a post related to WordPress then feel free to submit the links to these niche bookmarking services. This will not only help generate traffic for your blog but they also act as a great resource to find out what all you can achieve with WordPress.

6. WP Beginner.

WP Beginner is one of my favorite blogs when it comes to WordPress. Its constantly updated and has been truly focused on making WordPress easy for the beginners to adopt. The guides in the blog are very simple to understand and have been written to ensure that even the new users won’t find it difficult to follow the instructions.

7. WP Tavern.

We’ve already featured a great interview by Jeff Chandler, WordPress Guru behind WPTavern. Even though, we’ve listed this as 7th blog in this list, I’m sure if you’d ask from any WordPress lover – they’d easily place this blog as number one resource at the moment. Jeff ensures that you get all the scoop and information around WordPress on this blog and thats why it becomes one of our favorite destination as well.

8. WP Engineer.

WPEngineer is yet another blog that rocks. It features pretty neat articles on how to customize WordPress according to the way you want. This blog will definitely be liked by budding developers as the posts are focused towards editing themes. So if you have a brave heart and love to play around with tech stuff, then you’d surely fall in love with this blog.

If by any chance you think we’ve missed a worthy blog on the topic of WordPress – please let us know about it and we’d happy to include it in this list. If you liked this post, then don’t forget to share it with others!

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Why I ditched WordPress for Blogger!

15 Jan, 2010 | mayank

Topics: Blogging Resources

Image Credit - AyudaWordPress

I’m completely sane and I haven’t ditched WordPress for Blogger at the moment. I’m talking about the time when WordPress was pretty young and like the infamous “browser wars”, blogging world was buzzing about “Clash of Blogging platforms!” It was nearly 4 yrs. ago when I started jumping in Blogging and at that moment, WordPress was already giving good fight to Google’s Blogger. Questions can be asked that why am I writing about this after so many years, the answer is that Keith has asked this question from everyone. Don’t forget to post your response too!

So, coming back to the question – during that time, I was super excited about every product from Google and Blogger was no exception. My technical knowledge was limited to fixing up Windows and I was just trying to take dip in the world of being a true webmaster.

So Why Did I Ditch WordPress?

Ease of Use – Blogger has always been a wonderful platform for those who are technically challenged. At that time, WordPress was considered to be choice of techies and surely wasn’t as easy as Blogger.
Not extensible – WordPress at that time didn’t have as many powerful plugins as we have now. However, there were already lots of hacks, tutorials available for Blogger. I’ve learned almost everything with the help of mighty Google. It didn’t take me any time to play around with Blogger that much.
Fear of screwing up things – Even though techie by nature, the initial hitch of trying something more techie gave me chills. I always had the question “what if” haunting me. However, there was hardly anything in Blogger that scared me. There were times, when I wanted to put Flash widgets in my blog and found it super difficult in WordPress where as Blogger made me feel as if I’m home!
Google’s branding – When you know that such big name is behind a service then you feel comfortable. You know that nothing will happen to your blog if you don’t do dirty things. However, WordPress was only developing at that moment. So, my inclination was more towards Blogger.
Not many beautiful designs – Blogger’s template engine has always been pretty similar to the normal HTML, so it was very easy for designers to create templates for it. For this very reason, there were ample amount of beautiful templates for blogger as compared to WordPress.

Keeping those points in mind, I decided to ditch WordPress against Blogger, however after few months of Blogging, I realized that if I have to become professional blogger, I would have to shift my Blog to WordPress and face my fears. The moment, I got the feeling of having no other option, I decided to take the step and since then I’ve been using WordPress. I was actually surprised to see that, things were tremendously easy in WordPress and with in no time, I was playing around with it pretty comfortably.

Now I can’t imagine my life without WordPress, not only it helps me keep our blog running smoothly, it helps me in earning my bread and butter too. Moreover, there are far too many resources available that ensure that you are never stuck even if you have any problem.

What was your reaction when you first used WordPress? Were you scared like me or was your reaction like that of Keith’s? Do share your experience with us or write a blog post as I did.

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10 Hottest Bloggers You Must Check Out

7 Sep, 2009 | mayank

Topics: Blogging Resources

The blogging industry has become bigger, better and hotter over the past some time. This post goes out to people who might think that blogging is only for technology freaks or geeks (sometimes misinterpreted as ugly spectacled unshaven dudes with no sense of humor). The world of blogging is as much a female’s companion as it is for guys who love the new trend. So I decided to do a post on some of the most beautiful bloggers babes I came across on the internet. They publish their original content, connect with people and make a lot of money from it. See a direct relation between the moolah and the chicks? Co-incidence or not, these females have really got some eyes set on them. Here is a list of the top 10 hottest female bloggers from the blogosphere :

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5 things that you must do when you sign up at twitter

24 Jun, 2009 | mayank

Topics: Blogging Resources

Twitter has been my work place, playground and I’ve been hooked to it since I started using it actively. Not only it helps me find latest information about my favorite topics, it helps me connect with new people pretty easily. It also helps me in getting clients, isn’t that like “the cashew nuts in hot chocolate fudge”?

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WordPress MU to merge; Ads on WordPress.com

19 Jun, 2009 | mayank

Topics: Blogging Resources

WordPress MU will be merged with WordPress! This news came as a surprise to me and the bigger surprise is that, I missed this news. Generally, i don’t miss the news related to WordPress, however I was away from the world of internet when this news came. Coming back to the news -

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Learn the art of inbound marketing from the experts!

5 Jun, 2009 | mayank

Topics: Blog Traffic, Blogging Resources

HubSpot has been one of my favorite blogs on Internet Marketing and will always suggest internet marketers and business owners to subscribe to their newsletter or RSS feed. They are experts in internet marketing and I’m happy for the fact that they have launched Inbound Marketing University program.

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Practical guide on how to increase blog subscriber base!

27 May, 2009 | mayank

Topics: Blog Marketing, Blogging Resources, Blogging Tips

Today, my friend Vivek was having a chat with me on the phone and asked a common however, a difficult question – “how many blog subscribers do you have and how to increase the subscriber base?” The first part of the question is not difficult at all, as I can easily track my subscriber base with the help of Feedburner and currently this blog’s subscriber base hovers between 920-950 subscribers. It is the second part of the question that is slightly difficult to answer as it has been already answered by most of the professional bloggers who have more than 50,000 subscribers.

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Official Channel for news & updates about WordPress

Blogs from WordPress community

1. Weblog Tools Collection

2. Pro Blog Design

3. Cats Who Code

4. WPHacks

5. WPscoop & WPVote.

6. WP Beginner.

7. WP Tavern.

8. WP Engineer.

So Why Did I Ditch WordPress?

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