Web design is complicated. There’s a heck of a lot to learn. Typography, usability, color theory, the list goes on… ProBlogDesign has collected together 26 blog design tutorials from the web that take you through the process of designing a blog, from scratch.

If it’s time for you to learn a new style of design, working through a complete project in one of the guides below is the best way to start. These posts take you step by step so even if your Photoshop skills aren’t the best yet, you won’t be left behind!

Source: 26 Complete WordPress Blog Design Tutorials

Tweetable is a WordPress Plugin intended to help integrate Twitter into your blog. It can tweet your blog posts as they are published, shortening the URLs with either Tr.im or Is.gd and optionally including Google Analytics campaign tags. You can display your latest tweet(s) in your blog sidebar with a customizable widget, which can even display your follower count.

Tweetable adds functions that turn the WordPress admin into a twitter client. The Tweet screen lets you update your status and browse your friends’. The Track page let’s you save keywords to be searched so you can keep an eye on what Twitter as a whole is saying about a given topic. You can set the minimum user level required to access the menus if you would like to allow other authors access.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.7+
Source: http://www.webmaster-source.com/tweetable-twitter-plugin-wordpress/

Weblog software is designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of weblogs. As specialized content management systems, weblog applications support the authoring, editing, and publishing of blog posts and comments, with special functions for image management, web syndication, and moderation of posts and comments.

We all know WordPress is one the most popular weblog applications. What other options can we choose? We have collected the following Top Quality Weblog Software Other Than WordPress for you.

Melody is an open source content management, blogging and publishing platform, derived from the popular blogging tool Movable Type. At its onset, Melody is distinct from Movable Type by having put in place a set of processes that assist the greater Movable Type and Melody communities to contribute features, changes and fixes more freely and quickly back to the core product. This allows independent developers to pursue the features and preferences that matter to them most.

The promise of Melody is to serve its community by working to build a product according to the principles and philosophies that have helped make WordPress, Apache, Linux, Firefox and other open source applications so successful. Those principles include creating and fostering open communication channels with its user base, by building transparency into its roadmap, and by permitting users to more freely contribute back to the core product.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://openmelody.org/

When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the worldwide web – a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations – ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, the patience of a saint.

Textpattern is a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system and it is both free and open source. Textpattern is a web application designed to help overcome these and other hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.textpattern.com/

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL (”General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://drupal.org/

Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams with the following main features. Built from the ground up to be as simple as possible, Radiant features an elegant administrative interface that centers around three key components: pages, snippets, and layouts. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone loves to laugh. Have you imagine there are many funny things about blogging? bLaugh is a MAD Magazine for the Blogosphere. You can find lots of funny comics of the blogosphere there. Expect parodies of “A-List” bloggers all the way down to the meme of the day - no holds barred.

We have collected the following Top 25 Funniest Comic Strips About Blogging from bLaugh. Please feel free to share your favourite ones as well. Now sit back, relax and laugh please.

Shrinking Self Esteem

Vowing Wedding Favors

Good Quality Pet Blogging

Read the rest of this entry »

Platinum SEO Plugin is the ultimate wordpress SEO solution.Platinum SEO Plugin offers all the features of All in One SEO plugin plus more. Platinum provide an ultimate onsite SEO (search engine optimization) solution for wordpress blogs. If you are already using All In One SEO Pack, this plugin will automatically import all the settings, that you have defined using All in one SEO plugin. You can check out the features of Platinum SEO Plugin:

• Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines
• Generates all SEO relevant META tags automatically
• Helps you avoid duplicate content
• Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page
• Compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.However you may have to disable All in One SEO pack
• You don’t have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not satisfied with the current permalink, change it through Settings–>Permalinks in your admin panel, without worrying about loss of Page rank or google penalty.Platinum SEO plugin will take care of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location.This is a new essential feature, not present in All in one SEO
• Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page.These options are not available in All in one SEO Pack.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 1.5+
Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/

CustomWeb2 features exclusive access to a collection of well designed, and valid XHTML/CSS templates for the open source content management system, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Zen Cart, vBulletin, and Magento.

Designed to be a one-stop shop for web developers, designers, and even casual bloggers, CustomWeb2 provides members with a comprehensive selection of premium templates and graphics for about the same price as a typical individual template. Under this CW2 Club Membership, you get access to all the templates in CustomWeb2, concurrent licensed domains, and boundless domain copyrights removal. Any template can be used for as many clients as you want and for as many sites that you wish. For this membership, you have to make an initial payment of $99 (one-time) and thereafter a recurring payment of $20 (every 30 days).

Membership includes expert technical support and access to the club’s community forum where members can share valuable information and resources. The club also has an affiliate program where members can earn bonus money and commission from the sale of additional memberships and custom services.

Then, there is the Single Domain License. This is an economy package with prices varying between $29 and $79. It’s for those who want to buy just a single template, but who do not want to become club members.

The sign up process is very simple. Just go to the “Sign Up!” page, select your membership plan and enter your account information. And then, you can have unlimited access to the templates and tools. What are you waiting for?

Source: http://www.customweb2.com/

What Others Are Saying allows you to display the most recent post of your favourite blogs somewhere on your site. It utilises the RSS link field from the blogroll for each of your links. If the RSS link exists it attempts to get the last post from it. It then displays the most recent X number of posts depending on your settings. Each blog can have one post in the list.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: Wordpress 2.0.7+
Source: http://www.stuffbysarah.net/blog/wordpress-plugins/what-others-are-saying/

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: Wordpress 1.5+
Source: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml…

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, we recommend the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin (originally authored by the awesome Steve Smith). The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can Read the rest of this entry »

Futurosity Aperio Prototype is designed specifically for image heavy sites: photographers, illustrators, designers. Futurosity Aperio Prototype features your latest posts on the home page. It will display post images if available. It requires WordPress 2.3.2.

It is built on Sandbox for power and flexibility and has been tested in Safari, Firefox, and IE 7. It should also work in IE6, but some of the formatting and effects are sacrificed.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.3.2+
Source: http://www.futurosity.com/wordpress-theme-futurosity-aperio-prototype

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window. Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.7
Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

WordPress is very powerful and easy to use. We have been searching for some of the best free WordPress themes available on the internet, and compiled them into 45 Best Free WordPress Themes of All Time. All of them are nicely designed and look really professional. You should be able to find the suitable one for your WordPress blog. Enjoy~

BloggingPro Wordpress comes in two versions, one with the big footer like Blogging Pro, that gives information on recent posts, recent comments and most commented stories, and one without the big footer, and thus no need for any plugins at all.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: Wordpress 2.0+
Source: http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2007/03/21/blogging-pros…

Lemon Lime v1.0 for WordPress. If you make modifications to the theme he would really love to see it, so he can learn a lot from those more experienced.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.farfromfearless.com/2007/01/25/fff…

iTheme is a WordPress theme that is designed for the Mac lovers with a truly customizable sidebar. As an administrator, you can customize  Read the rest of this entry »