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!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!
4. 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.
5. 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.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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1. Joanne Colan : This babe created ripples and left eyes popping out in the blogging industry when she started hosting the popular vlog Rocketboom. She was originally a VJ with MTV from the years 2000-04. She could probably be one of the most well known female bloggers of our times. Colan also hosted a travel adventure TV series by the name of Any Given Latitude. (She’s no more with RocketBoom now).

2. Olivia Zaleski : Olivia is best known as the Eco-chick in the world blogosphere. She is the environmental columnist for The Huffington Post and also writes for TheDailyGreen.com. According to her bio at TreeHugger.com (she isn’t with TreeHugger anymore), Olivia can survive in the wilderness for days at a time as long as she has a few bagels and a hunk of Cabot cheese. That is why she is on our list of top hottest bloggers.

3. Jessamy Hawley : The beautiful gadget lover and Senior Writer at T3 Magazine’s GadgetCandy, Jessamy Hawley is no. 3 on our list of hottest bloggers. We would love to see her in a bikini for the obvious reasons of her extreme hotness.

4. Sara Benincasa : This American comedienne is most famous for her series of interviews conducted in a bath-tub named Tub Talk with Sara B. She was also featured on Nerve.com’s BlogALog as a comedy blogger. She also maintains a personal blog of her own. Any reason why she shouldn’t be on list? Anyone???

Courtesy: Paulandstorm.com

5. Veronica Belmont: Veronica Belmont is the girl who joined CNN, interned there and then set off to produce and host her own podcast at Mahalo. She is also the host of the monthly PS3 based video on demand program called Qore and co-hosts Revision3 show with Tekzilla. She was also named the Sexiest Geek by Violet Blue in Top 10 Sexiest Geeks list. Apart from these, she has also made guest appearances in Diggnation, this WEEK in TECH, Cranky Geeks and The 404 podcast.

6. Agnes Elena : Agnes, the hottie, is a prolific blogger whose interests include science, photography, and film. She has a new site coming and is as pretty as she is geeky.

7. Jessica ‘Louise’ Cutler : She is probably the most controversial of all female bloggers the world might have seen. Why? Well Jessica thought it was a good idea to write a blog about her active sexual life along with graphic details. The former congressional staff assistant for Senator Michael DeWine even blogged details like she received money for sex. Cutler said in a statement once “I’m sure I am not the only one who makes money on the side this way: How can anybody live on $25K/year??” The blog was called Washingtonienne.

8. Sasha Samuel : She blogs about almost everything she does. Her life, her adventures and places she travels to apart from giving little insights about dating and love. She also covers a little bit of technology sometimes. She once quoted “It’s all about kicking back and enjoying life, sweetie. Let the sun make you golden.” Pretty sad to see that she hasn’t posted on her blog for long enough.

9. Marlo Meekins : This chick is every man’s fantasy come true. She is artistic, makes amazing caricatures and know how to blog about it. Her sketches are brilliant. She looks like a princess fallen straight out of a fairy tale. Almost angelic with the adequate knowledge she carries.

10. Wendy Cheng : She is 21, parties all the time and then righteously blogs about them. There is more than the loud make-up to look out for. With her reader count crossing more than 10,000 a day, she is easily one of the most read bloggers in the world. Her popularity is quite high in Singapore.

Thanks to Sameer for writing this blog post at such a short notice. I’m not feeling well as I’m suffering from Flu :(. If you like you can contribute to Blog Design Studio then feel free to contact me – me at mayank dot info

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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1. Complete your profile – I guess there are more bots on twitter than the actual users! Thanks to stupid scripts that automate things and ruin the experience as generally I get a feeling that most of the people who follow me are doing it through auto-follow scripts. As when I visit their profile, they are generally filled with nothing but links to their own blogs and they don’t have their profile complete! It’s important that if you really want to ensure that people don’t think that you are bot, one should complete their profile. You can simply go to the settings page and should fill all the fields like Your Name, Location, One-Line bio is a must, URL to your homepage also helps! One should also upload their avatar and if possible make a custom twitter background too!

2. Follow people wisely & slowly – I’ve come across hundreds of profiles where a user has followed more than 1000 users and has less than 50 people who are following him/her. The very first thought that comes in my mind after looking at such a profile is “It’s a bot or spammer!” I would suggest that one should first of all find their friends on twitter and if you don’t have many friends on twitter, then simply go to Twitter search and search for your favorite topic and you’ll find hundreds of people to follow. Try to have a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people who are following you!

3. Conversations are important – After you follow few people, you should follow their tweets to see with whom are they having conversations. Start taking part in those conversations as I’ve noticed that people don’t really mind if people jump in their conversations in between! If you talk sense, I’m sure people will start following you back!

4. Sharing is important – It’s important to share links, photos of other people. Remember one simple thing, if you’ll share valuable information and good resources, people would love to follow you and will recommend you in #FollowFriday! You should also recommend other twitter users who you think share good resources. In simple terms, you should create value in your twitter profile. It’s a great tool for personal branding! One should also retweet the resourceful tweets of other users!

5. Use the right tools – If I’d say that Twitter’s web interface sucks! then most of the power users will agree to me. Twitter’s own web interface doesn’t offer as many options as other services are offering that are build on top of twitter platform! I personally prefer TweetDeck and I think it’s the most powerful twitter client. Not only it’s free, it’s runs on windows, mac and linux too! It has so many features that a complete post can be easily dedicated to it! Apart from that, feel free to go through various Twitter tools over here.

These are some of the points that one should follow when they sign up at Twitter and obviously there are more tips that I will offer on this blog. Feel free to subscribe to this blog through newsletter or through RSS feeds!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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There were few details given in this announcement but conventional wisdom suggests that, either during the installation process or later down the road, a blog administrator would have the ability to “flip a switch” and turn on the capabilities of the WordPress MU system.

It completely makes sense to have one single installation for both the systems as WordPress MU has more than 90% of the code from WordPress itself. It’s really the multi-user part that’s little different. Aaron’s guess is that both the software will merge in the WordPress 2.9 release, although I believe that such a great change should be made available in WordPress 3.0 instead!

In another news, bloggers will be able to show public service ads on their WordPress.com blog. This feature was made possible after Automattic and SocialVibe partnered with each other. Under the partnership, bloggers will be able to run ads on their blog and any revenue that’d be generated through it, will be used for charity.

With the latest deal, WordPress.com bloggers can now sign up for a SocialVibe widget; they choose a specific charity and corresponding brand sponsor, embed the ad unit in their blog, and start earning micro-donations from the brand once readers interact with the sponsored units.

This surely counts as a good move! It should definitely help SocialVibe to raise substantial amount of money as the collective traffic on WordPress.com blog is really impressive. If there would have been a little cut for the bloggers’ too then more bloggers would have embraced this new feature!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Inbound Marketing University (IMU) is a free marketing retraining program for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.

They’ve tied up with leading internet marketing professionals like Chris Brogan, Brian Carroll, Mack Collier, Rand Fishkin, Eric Groves, Ann Handley, Jeanne Hopkins, Lee Odden, David Meerman Scott, Marshall Sponder of Monster.com, Elyse Tager and my favorite Mike Volpe. These professors will teach you internet marketing for a week (15th – 19th June, 2009) and will also have a certification exam to test your learnings.

If you are a business owner or if you are into online marketing for your company then you can’t afford to miss this program. This is once in a lifetime opportunity to learn the stuff from the industry experts and that too for free!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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It may sound like that we don’t have many subscribers however, I’ve really not done enough work on this blog to gain that many subscribers too. I’ve just stuck to basics that I’m putting here and will also put other practical tips that other bloggers have used to ensure that they get more and more number of subscribers.

Increase your blog subscriber base

1. Niche blogs enjoy more number of subscribers – It has been noticed that if you have a blog on one particular topic/subject then you’d definitely get more number of bloggers. Blog Design Studio focuses specifically on WordPress & Blogging related tips and that’s why we’ve got these many subscribers and that too without much efforts.

2. Write posts regularly – I’ve kept a low pace of posts on this blog and normally I post not more than 4-5 posts in a week. Although, I’ve got plans to post more and more posts on it as I’ve noticed that the more posts you publish, you’d attract more subscribers as most of the subscribers are interested in a particular topic and want more and more information about it.

3. Don’t forget to add the value in the posts – If you really want to increase the subscriber base, then you should ask these questions every time you decide to write a blog post -

1. Will this add value for my subscribers?
2. Will this post serve the purpose for the new visitor and will it make sense to them?
3. Am I bringing a new perspective to this news?

The moment you’ll take care of these questions in your blog post, you’ll definitely churn out a high quality post that’ll attract readers and in turn they’ll become the subscribers. If there is any blog that I’d consider

4. Good marketing is a must – I’ve seen many wonderful posts that deserve digg front page or retweets that Mashable attracts, however they don’t have good number of subscribers. Why is that? The answer is “they lack good marketing”! I’m working on it, so I won’t be the best person however, I’ll list out common stuff, quotes, links from other famous and popular bloggers -

4a) 30 web design seo tips for web masters (also true for bloggers).
4b) How to market your blog in 2007 (its true in 2009 and will be true in coming years as well)
4c) Hit Digg’s front page by writing killer headlines.

4d) It’s important to be in touch and network with bloggers. You’d see that most of the tips will be around latest and “IN” thing of the year. Be active on most of the social networks, however focus mainly on one of them (you’d have to find out which one is easy to use and the one which is working for you).

Remember these wonderful lines by Darren (my blogging guru) -

20 minutes onTwitter, 5 minutes on MySpace, 20 minutes reading other blogs on Google Reader, 30 minutes checking out photos of friends on Facebook, 20 minutes checking out the latest threads on our favorite forums, back to Twitter for 20 minutes, 15 minutes following links we found on Digg……..

It’s easy to get to the end of the day and wonder what it was that we really achieved. We aimlessly drift around the web and have very little to show for the time we spend.

5. Blog design plays an important role too – One of the key reasons due to which we’ve got a decent subscriber base is that we have a good blog design and we focused in ensuring that the readers should see the subscribing options at important places. Check out these posts to find out that the role of a blog design in increasing the subscriber base -

5a) “Who sees ads” trick increased email subscriber base by 180%.
5b) How to increase subscribers by 50% in 30 days.

By good blog design, I don’t mean visually appealing and jazzy graphics! By good blog design, I mean that it the navigation should be easy and important things should be placed well in the sidebar and should be above the fold. Any good blog designer will work on those elements for you if you’ll tell them about your blog strategy of increasing the subscriber base.

I think if you would follow what I’ve written above and what you’d read in the links that I’ve mentioned in this blog post, you’d really be able to increase the blog subscriber base to the level you want to see. There is no other rocket science involved and no computer algorithms are required! It’s pretty simple and yet complicated, so the choice is yours! Don’t lose your focus and keep blogging with a plan in mind and you’d be one of popular blogger on charts!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Why am I shifting the servers?

Dreamhost has been an excellent service. They have a wonderful system in place and I didn’t feel any hassles in that, however its costing me more than I should be spending on the web hosting. That’s the only reason why I’m shifting from Dreamhost to WPWebhost.

Reviews of WPWebhost were the key!

I’ve read some good reviews about WPWebhost and I was glad to see that most of the bloggers that I know or love to read their blogs are shifting to WPWebhost, so definitely they must be doing something right. Naldz Graphics, WPHacks wrote their reviews here.

As of now, I can only say that WPWebhost has been pretty supportive as they are helping me shift the server completely and the biggest thing is that they have got a wonderful package for bloggers. I’ll have the detailed review, once I’ll be completely satisfied with them :)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Andrew has taken up the comments of Matt Mullenweg -

“Blogs will become aggregation points, they will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

Good thing with Andrew’s post is that he’s not just spoken about Blogging in general, however has commented on how blogging is evolving itself. Although, he doesn’t seem to agree with what Matt has to say about blogging.

Although, I agree to Matt and have similar thoughts – however there are other few things that I would like to add, however before that I would like to take the excerpt from WikiPedia that tells us that what exactly is a blog -

A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Keeping the above definition in mind, I’ll discuss this particular topic and will discuss the future of blogs and blogging in detail. I’ll will try to bring some factual side of it to support my statements. Most of the guys are now saying that blogs are dead and believe that social networking websites is something that’ll rule the web.

“regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video” – Is it possible in Facebook? The answer is YES. So, can’t we say that Social networking websites are just another form of blogging and Facebook like sites are just another tool like blog softwares? So that means, we can call ‘your personal facebook profile’ as ‘your personal blog’. With all that, it means that Personal blogging is not dead!

That was one side of blogging i.e. personal blogging. Then we have another side of blogging and that is business blogging and when we talk about that, it really becomes a vast topic to discuss. I would love to keep it short and will try to explain it in one shot itself – Blogs are now used by Fortune 500 companies, major publications, business schools and just about every one else you may think of. Guess what, even politicians maintain a blog to ensure that they can communicate with their readers with ease. So, can we say that Blogs are dead? I guess the answer will be NO.

Talking about factual information. Technorati comes up with State of the Blogosphere and they’ve posted some really nice facts as well. Here i’ve brought just a tiny part of it -

Blogs are here to stay.. Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.

If we can say that both the forms of blogging exist then how can we say that blogs are dead? The question arises though, what will be the future of blogs, will they continue to evolve like this or will there be a point when we’ll experience the saturation. I personally believe that blogging is going to stay and will stay forever, in one form or the other. Blogs are just tools that empower a user to publish their ideas, events, happenings etc. and if we are talking about tool, then they’ll surely evolve and will take a different shape, however if we are talking about blogging then it is always going to be there.

What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think blogs are dead, if so – then I would welcome you to discuss this topic in detail with us in whatever way you want to discuss. If you tend to agree to what I feel, then you are invited for a cup of coffee at my place :)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Alex King, founder of Crowd Favorite and one of the pioneers in WordPress themes, plugin development has announced a new service called WordPress Help Center. Jeff has already mentioned about this on WPCandy and has come up with few wonderful points that Alex will surely be listening to. Here’s what Jeff (his interview with us) thinks about this service -

While I like the idea behind the WordPress HelpCenter, I wonder why we need one in the first place. Has the WordPress.org support forums which are supposed to be the go to place for support become such a pain for end users that it would be much simpler to just pick up the phone and give these guys a call?

So will the HelpCenter knock other forms of support out of the water? I don’t think so given their inherent limitations. However, I do think Alex King is on the right track creating a service where people can simply pick up the phone, answer a commonly asked question, and provide immediate satisfaction.

I completely agree with the points that Jeff has made however, I do have my opinion and some ideas that may attract someone else to start the idea at a larger or a bigger scale.

My thoughts on WordPress Help Center

Honestly, I liked the idea of WordPress help center – while most of the professional bloggers have already done and read about WordPress there are many bloggers who really don’t care about all that and want quick solutions as they want to stay focused on their writing and believe in things that work out of the box.

Other than that, there are situations where one may not want to get his hands dirty, I remember an incident where I merged two WordPress blogs of mine and wanted to ensure that the search engine should not penalize my domain and that all the indexed pages of one blog should get replaced by the new blog’s URL. The solution was pretty simple, however I literally spent more than 5 hrs. to find out that solution. If WordPress Help Center can help me get these kind of solutions in less than 30 mins., I’ll be much more happy to spend my money on this service! While everything is there, I’m sure there will many businesses who are using WordPress for their blogs and they may not have a dedicated IT team to support them, they’ll definitely find this service pretty useful.

Shortcomings of the service & few suggestions

I’m not sure if Alex knew about the fact that a call from Skype to a toll-free number in US & UK is completely free of charge from any part of the world. So, he could have covered a bigger userbase if they would have used a toll-free number instead of a local US number.

Another point that limits this service is that it is not available for 24×7. I can understand this step, as this is just a new initiative and the business can be scaled depending on the demand of the service. I think it was a wise decision in a way. And who knows, that someone in other parts of the world may be interested in starting up a service like this or may want to partner with Alex to offer the support at times other than 9am-7pm Pacific time.

What do you think about having such a service? Do you think that it can be a viable business model or you think that the support on the web through forums, emails etc is enough? Please share your thoughts with us.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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