WPStart.org

After 5 days in Greece (Athens and Mykonos) I’m back home in Norway ready for more work ;) I had a very nice trip and believe that I have a lot of blog posts from the WordPress Community to read. So here is the best articles from the WordPress Community from the last 5 – 6 days.

WordPress

• Introducing Blogs.mu
  So, there you go, that’s our big news – say hello to Blogs.mu.
  -By WPMU
• A premium solution
  So here’s the problem: WordPress has thousands of themes. These themes are currently divided into two arbitrary, self-titled, ambiguous, tiers: premium and other. The definition of premium may or may not include payment, servicing, licensing standards, features, and quality, depending on who you ask. So how is a chap to compare themes? Well, I think I may have a solution.
  - By WP Fun
• People Who Rock WordPress
  A new project called We Rock WordPress headed by Netizens Media aims to showcase the cream of the crop when it comes to talent in the WordPress community. Out of the 23 people on the site thus far, I have interacted or know of 18 of them. Not bad I guess. Like WPZooms 20 WordPress Rockstars post, this site showcases mugshots instead of graphics.
  - By WP Tavern
• Premium only in name: The state of paid-for WP themes
  It is part of my daily “job” to follow what’s going on in the WordPress theming community and I must admit that I’ve been slightly disappointed with the recent spade of “premium” theme releases. At the moment it just seems that everyone is jumping on a bandwagon, in the hope of making a quick buck and in the process they are totally ignorant to the quality of their offering.
  - By Adii Rockstar
• Harness The Power of Wordpress Child Themes
  How long does it take you to build or modify a wordpress theme? Do you sometimes get frustrated by the time it takes for you to finish a theme even if you’ve already created a handful of them? Did you ever wish there was an easier way? Actually there is, and the answer is by using Wordpress child themes.
  - By Raymond Selda

WordPress Tutorials, Tips and How to’s

• Moderate Wordpress Comments Live on Your Desktop
  How often do you check your blog dashboard for unmoderated comments? If you would prefer a desktop client for moderating wordpress blog comments here is some good news for you. Daniel Dura has released an Adobe AIR desktop client called Moderator which allows you to moderate your blog comments from desktop in real time and without requiring your browser.
  - By Amit Banerjee on Quick Online Tips
• WordPress Proxysupport
  Who is using WordPress in an intranet environment, will quickly realize, that despite internet connection, no feed content gets loaded in the backend. In general, it’s because of the proxy of the company. So far WordPress wasn’t particularly flexible in this case. As of WordPress 2.8 that will change and new constants make ensure that you now can enter the proxy directly to wp-config.php.
  - By WP Engineer
• WordPress Weekend Resources – May 15, 2009
  Another week, another set of weekend resources. Got some good ones this week.
  - By Theme Lab
• Add private notes to your WordPress blog posts
  Sometimes, you may need to leave a private note (Only visible to admins) to a post, but there’s no built-in solution in WordPress to do it. So, here’s a nice hack I use on my blogs.
  - By Jean-Baptiste Jung on WP Recipes
• EasyWP: Install WordPress in One Click
  Something to watch: EasyWP is a one-file script that downloads and unzips latest WordPress build on your web server (so the average Joe doesn’t have to download the archive, unzip on his computer, and then upload everything).
  - By planetOzh
• WordPress Plugin Compatibility Checker
  Community member Andrea passed this along on Twitter the other day. It’s called the WordPress plugin compatibility checker. The sites to scan the WordPress repository on a regular basis to show plugin authors if their plugin meets the guidelines for compliance. Amongst the data collected so far, it has been discovered that a few false positives do exist. If your plugin happens to have one of these false positives, I recommend signing up to the BraveNewCode forum and let them know so they can increase the accuracy of their dataset.
  - By WP Tavern
• Multiple Page WordPress Posts
  There may be occasions when you want to split a WordPress post or page into multiple pages. This can be useful and reduce load times if it is a particularly long article or has a lot of images embedded in it. This is easy to do using WordPress.
  - By WordPress Max
• How To: Use WordPress Conditional Tags to Hack Your Theme
  By using simple conditional tags – it’s pretty easy to add some very basic hacks to your Wordpress theme to have more control over what’s displayed when.
  - By John Pratt on WP Hacks
• Advanced Wordpress Thumbnail Generation
  Thumbnails in Wordpress themes are a critical part of relaying the topic or aspect of the article/post you’ve written. With some simple tricks you can add your own to your theme, and there are even plugins out there to do it for you. The fact of the matter is that these systems you have in place have faults, so here’s a video detailing how to create an advanced Wordpress Thumbnail generator in your own theme.
  - By Fire Studios
• Publishing Extend of WordPress
  Not always you want to solve things like WordPress provides and you seek for a different solution. Sometimes you don’t need various applications of the backend to publish posts.
  - By WP Engineer
• Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress
  In our previous articles on WordPress hacks, we discussed the incredible flexibility of WordPress, which is one of the biggest reasons for its popularity among bloggers worldwide. Custom fields in particular, which let users create variables and add custom values to them, are one of the reasons for WordPress’ flexibility.
  - By Jean-Baptiste Jung on Smashing Magazine
• WordPress shortcode: Display content to registered users only
  Ever wanted to be able to show some content only to registered users in your blog posts? If yes, just read this recipe, which contains an awesome shortcode to do it!
  - By Jean-Baptiste Jung on WP Recipes
• Five Nifty Sidebar Widgets for your WordPress Site
  In my last post I discussed WordPress plugins that can spruce up your WordPress based website. What I would like to do in this one is point out five sidebar widgets that you can put to use in your own sidebar to expand its capabilities and add additional functionality to your site for your visitors.
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• What The Hell, Wordpress?
  I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but Wordpress defaults to 302 redirects. This is, for the most part, not a good thing. You’ll probably find this affecting you most when you have people linking to both http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com. If you’re using Wordpress’ default 302s, then you won’t get the link juice from the URL that’s being redirected.
  - By Shark SEO
• FirePHP and WordPress
  WordPress uses a whole series of constants and variables that may be useful. Even better if you know what is in there. A clean output of the contents can be realized with the Firefox add-on FirePHP for Firebug.
  - By WP Engineer
• Creating Theme Options
  If you create WordPress themes then a useful addition to a standard theme is to give the user a simple way to change the logo or header in use, perhaps allow them to change the colour of the background, the width of the site too. These options are designed to save people time but more importantly, to make it easy for non-developers to make a few alterations to their theme without needing to go looking through the code.
  - By Bloggingtips
• Need Help With That?
  Over the past two years, I’ve had the privilege to talk with a number of different plugin/theme developers. While they each have their own unique style of getting things done, one thing they all have in common is providing support.
  - By Jeff Chandler on Weblog Tools Collection
• Generate rss feed for several tags on your WordPress blog
  You know it, RSS feeds are a very popular way to read blogs. So why only purpose one feed to your readers? In this recipe, I’ll show you how to easily generate RSS feeds for several tags.
  - By Jean-Baptiste Jung on WP Recipes
• 25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS
  WordPress is often thought of as little more than a blogging platform. But it’s capable of so much more. Through a little customization and the use of plugins, WordPress can easily be transformed into a full-featured content management system. Here are more than 25 sites who have done just that (and done it well).
  - By Noupe
• Create a Business Wordpress PSD Layout
  In this tutorial I will show you how to create a nice business Wordpress layout. this PSD layout can be used also for a corporate layout. The PSD file is free for download for the next 24 hours. Subscribe to RSS or follow us on Twitter if you don’t want to miss our next releases
  - By Grafpedia
• Customize your 404 page from the WordPress admin
  Most 404 templates in WordPress themes suck. They generally read something like “404 Not Found” and give an extra sentence or two about an error. This is totally unnacceptable to a site visitor that comes across a 404 page.
  - By Justin Tadlock
• Widgetise Your Theme Part II
  Last week I wrote about how to widgetise your theme, and explained how to turn your sidebar into a dynamic sidebar, allowing you to add widgets from within your admin panel, rather than manually coding them into the sidebar. We can now take this one step further and create multiple sidebars/widget ‘blocks’.
  - By Bloggingtips

WordPress Plugins/Widgets

• Plugin: The DotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack
  The dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit from dotMobi to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.
  - By Blog Perfume
• Free Wordpress featured slider widget
  Easily put a slider in your wordpress installation by installing this widget without a need to hack your theme (or finding theme with featured slider widget). of course if you know how to custom wordpress theme this widget will be more flexible since you can place the slider anywhere in your theme.
  - By Tobacamp Development
• How To Add A Favicon To Your WordPress Blog
  “Blog Icons” is one of my favorite plugins created by Joost de Valk. This is a very simple plugin to use. It lets you easily add a favicon to your blog URL.
  - By PimpMyWordPress
• Tweetable Twitter Plugin For WordPress
  Yesterday I released my newest WordPress plugin: Tweetable. It helps integrate Twitter into your blog. It tweets your posts as they are published and adds a configurable sidebar widget that displays your latest tweets (with optional follower count). The automatic post-tweeting can be configured to use the URL shortener of your choice, and Google Analytics campaign tags can be included.
  - By Webmaster-Source
• WordPress Plugin Release for 12/05
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• Plugin: Broken Link Checker for WordPress
  Sometimes, links get broken. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.
  - By Blog Perfume
• Plugins to Spruce Up Your WordPress Based Website
  As many of you know – plugins can add significant functionality to your website. For instance there is a plugin that will add an entire forum to your site (Simple:Press) and there is another one that will allow your visitors to contact you via a customizable form (Contact Form 7).
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• WordPress Theme Tweaker Plugin Review
  I recently came across a pretty cool plugin called Theme Tweaker, which basically lets you alter the colors of your theme without touching your CSS code. I thought I would go over this plugin in a review post.
  - By Theme Lab

WordPress Themes

• WordPress Theme Releases for 05/14
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• A to Z of Free WordPress Themes (part 1)
  - By Alex Denning on Nometech
• WordPress Theme Releases for 10/05
  - By Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Links

• Blogs.mu
  Blogs.mu is a site that allows you to setup your own WordPress based blog community or network – with the minimum of fuss. Set up blogs yourself or let users come to you.
• wpazo – the best WordPress stuff
  w•pazo | wuh PAW zo | verb 1 to hit something or someone—esp. over the head—with the power of WordPress. noun 2 the best WordPress stuff. 3 a blog that hits you over the head with the good links to all the best WordPress stuff.

Pro Blogging and SEO

• Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization – Part 2
  Is it really that simple to bring your site and internal pages to the first page of Google results within a few simple steps? Yes, but you’ll need to learn a few basics about SEO and how search engines work.
  - By ThemeLib
• Promote Your Blog on Kindle, Make Money
  Currently in beta version, Kindle Publishing for Blogs allows any blog owner to sign up. Just fill out an application, fork over your RSS feed and Amazon will take care of the rest – including setting what they feel is a fair subscription price. Blog subscriptions will be priced between $0.99 and $1.99.
  - By Andrew G.R. on The Blog Herald
• Be Consistent and Useful – Thoughts on How Often to Publish on Your Blog
  In the last task of our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge I encouraged bloggers to set up a plan for the next steps in their blog. As an example I set up a hypothetical Blogging Calendar with an activity for each day of the next month.
  - By Darren Rowse on ProBlogger
• How To Get Blog Traffic By Pissing Off Your Audience
  It has been said that you never want to upset your customers. However, I’m here to tell you that sometimes there is a place for it. IF you do it strategically…
  - By David Risley
• Great Firefox Plug-Ins for Bloggers
  I abandoned Internet Explorer for Mozilla Firefox several years ago. But for whatever reason, I never embraced Firefox plug-ins. Perhaps it was laziness on my part or a simple misunderstanding of how practical some of the add-ons can be.
  - By Andrew G.R. on The Blog Herald
• A Strategy to Multiply Your Online Content
  I love blogging, but if you’re anything like me, then you find it hard to really grow your blog quickly. One of the main challenges is to be able to add new content to your blog on a consistent basis.
  - By Justin Brooke on Daily Blog Tips
• Onsite SEO-Things You Should Do If You Want Your Posts, Articles, etc. To Rank Well In The SERP’S
  How important is utilizing proper onsite seo techniques? Very important if you long for high ranking in the serps, and especially Google. If you succeed in a first page showing, for your keywords, in Google, I would imagine the other search engines are going to like your offerings as well.
  - By Cash Blog
• 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People
  Which is more important, driving traffic to your website or encouraging as many people as possible to see your content? Believe it or not, they are not one and the same.Too often, we as website owners live and die by web analytics applications. We fret about bounce rates, unique visitors and dwell time. However, when we focus so heavily on the performance of our website, we miss a fundamental point: we should aim to expose users to our content, not our website. The website is a tool to showcase our content, but it is not the only tool that does this.
  - By Paul Boag on Smashing Magazine
• How Not to Promote Your Blog: Top 10 Broken Blog Promotion Strategies
  For every great blog promotion strategy, there are five that suck. Really suck. They suck so bad that using them can get you blacklisted by real bloggers, ignored by annoyed readers, unfollowed on Twitter, and possibly placed on the terrorist watch list.
  - By Kevin Geary on ProBlogger
• The Entrepreneur’s Handbook – 58 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs
  As a first time entrepreneur you probably have tons of questions. And every time you do a Google search for an answer you are bombarded with too much information and in some cases that information contradicts other things you have heard. Due to this, I have created a list of 54 resources that should help you out.
  - By Neil Patel on Quick Sprout
• Sunday Morning SEO: How Many Links is Enough?
  Last month, I started SEO work for a client. The client has a website in a pretty popular niche. As I worked on the site, it surprised me how powerful SEO is especially the activity of link building. Since the client is in a popular niche, I thought it would be hard to get them a front page ranking. See one of the maxims in SEO is popular niches are very competitive. And the more competitive a niche is, the harder it is to attain a top 10 ranking.
  - By Dee Barizo on The Blog Herald
• SEO Experiment: Let Google Sort it Out
  One way to prevent Google from crawling certain pages is to use elements in the section of your web documents. For example, if I want to prevent Google from indexing and archiving a certain page
  - By Jeff Starr on Perishable Press
• 10 Ways to Launch a New Blog with a ‘Bang’
  Do you want to enter the blogosphere like a quiet librarian enters a classroom, or do you want to rock the stage? I am definitely one to rock stuff out and in this article I will share a few tips to help you make an attention grabbing launch.
  - By Webdesigner Depot

Blog Development/Design

• Diving into PHP: Day 15
  Continuing with our OOP review, today, we’ll create a very simple “calculator” class that should give you a better idea of how abstracting your code to its own class can save you a great deal of time. We’ll also take a look at the helpful “__construct” method, as well as creating variables. Enjoy!
  - By In the Woods
• The Ultimate Guide to .htaccess Files
  Apache’s .htaccess configuration files have baffled countless developers. This tutorial aims to break through this confusion by focusing on examples and thorough descriptions. Among the benefits of learning .htaccess configuration is automatic gzipping of your content, providing friendlier URLs, preventing hotlinking, improving caching, and more. First, the basics.
  - By Joseph Pecoraro on NETTUTS
• 7 Powerful image carousels for web designers
  This post is a collection of some powerful carousels for images and text content ready to use in your web projects. It includes Agile Carousel, YUI Carousel, JCarousel, iCarousel (jQuery + MooTools) and a tutorial about how to implement a simple Flickr-like carousel using Prototype-UI.
  - By Antonio Lupetti
• CSS Template Layouts: A Simpler CSS Layout System, Now Possible With JQuery
  For the longest time I’ve been waiting for browsers to support the CSS Template Layout module. Today, I found out that Alexis Deveria has given the web community the gift we’ve all been waiting for. Using JQuery and a plugin we can now take full advantage of the CSS Template Layout Module.
  - By Neal Grosskopf
• 27+ Handy Javascript Techniques for Web Designer
  Javascript is such an useful script language. It is used in many web sites to add functionality, validate forms, randomize images, and much more. Although it is not required to be pro coder, there are some useful techniques every web designer should know. In this post you will find 27+ useful JavaScript techniques, scripts, method and object that will help you save time in your next project.
  - By Desizn Tech

Freebies

• Free Social Media Icons & 275 New Premium App Icons
  To promote our new application icon set with 275 fantastic icons we’re giving away this free unique set of social media icons. The free Social media icons are available to everyone, and a nice little bonus for anyone buying the full set.
  - By Function Web Design & Development