Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! This talk: Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic, presented by Envato’s very own developer extraordinaire, Ryan Allen, will detail some of the potential pitfalls and solutions when maintaining massive WordPress blogs, like Tuts+. Don’t miss this great opportunity!

Source: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/scaling-wordpress-for-hi-traffic/

Web Icon Set aims to provide professional & quality web icons to web designer and developer. Every icon is 100% beautifully hand-crafted with consistency and usability. They are perfect for websites, web applications and wireframes creation.

Now, they got a limited time offer: Premium Icons Bundle. It contains all 5 premium icon sets, which includes Business Icon Set, Status Icon Set, Portfolio Icon Set, Hand Drawn Sketch Icon Set, Social Media Icon Set. You can get All 5 Premium Icon Sets for Just $20. This is your only chance to save 70% on this awesome deal! You can also check out their Free Icons section too.

Source: http://www.webiconset.com/

WordPress is easy to use software for publishing and maintaining blog style web pages. Most cheap webhosting companies with c-panel makes installing WordPress an easy process. If you use the mail hosting service provided by your host, you will be familiar with c-panel. Log in as if you were checking your e-mail and look for an option called Fantastico. This autoinstaller is also an easy way of installing WordPress. There is of course also a third alternative – WordPress hosting. Check out Hosting Observer if you want to find a list with top providers offering
this form of hosting.

Once WordPress is installed, you can login to the admin area to easily manage your blog. Plugins further enhance the functionality of WordPress. To find and install plugins, simply click “add plugins” from your WordPress plugins admin area and type a search term. The following 10 WordPress plugins are great for your blog.

1. All In One SEO Pack

This plugin helps get your blog indexed higher in the search engines by making search engine optimization (SEO) of your blog a breeze. It allows you to enter keywords, title meta tags and description meta tags to each blog post without knowing html and without directly editing the source code of your blog.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

This is another plugin that will help your blog rank higher in the search engines. It automatically generates a sitemap of your blog to help search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing index and rank the pages of your blog.

(more…)

Line25 has written a throughout tutorial on How to Build a Basic Portfolio WordPress Theme. It tells you how to take the design and convert it into a basic WordPress theme so you can easily manage and update your website through the popular WordPress application.

Source: How to Build a Basic Portfolio WordPress Theme

The world of blogging has simply exploded in the recent years. What once existed as nothing more than an outlet to share ones various thoughts with the world has become a staple of search engine optimization efforts. To further the rapid evolution in the world of blogging, no longer is one limited to blogging solely from their personal computer; now for many, blogging is done from anywhere courtesy of their mobile phone. In fact, in 2010 iPhone has introduced several wonderful apps that are being utilized exclusively by the serious blogger.

If you are looking to maximize your blogging efforts, then look no further than these wonderful top ten iPhone applications. No matter what type of blogging tickles your fancy, you can bet that in this list of applications, there is the perfect blogging tool for you.

1. If you are familiar with the more traditional powerful blogging forum then iPhones WordPress app may be just the app for you. The WordPress app allows users to seamlessly interact with their existing wordpress blog. This app offers all the blogging power that familiar wordpress users are accustomed to.

2. The WordPress app boasts a tremendous amount of functionality built to serve all your blogging needs. While this app is very powerful, it can be very cumbersome at times. If you are looking for a trimmed down version of WordPress, look no further than TypePad. This great app is the perfect solution for the blogger that wants to dedicate no more time to their blogs than is afforded by their train ride home from work. This great app offers wonderful blogging power with out all the needless frills of WordPress.

3. Bluepulse is another great micro blogger app. This application is much like the twitter app with the exception that it allows direct control over who receives your blog posts. Bluepulse also offers up the ability to attach photos to your post. All in all, this a very powerful blogging app. (more…)

In recent years, URL shortening services have gained a considerable popularity thanks to the large success of Twitter. These services (such as ThinyURL, Bit.ly, WP.me) provide Twitter friendly short aliases for redirection of long URLs.

A valuable use of these services is their integration with the pages of your WordPress blog so as to give to visitors short URL addresses ready to be shared on the popular microblogging service.

Source: 5 Practical Ways to Integrate URL Shortening Services on Your Blog

Digg has recevied a lot of negative feedback after the release of V4.0. A lot of users have mentioned that they are no longer able to keep track of their friends’ submissions easily. However, Digger Plus has launched Sub.Diggerplus.com, which can save you so much time when browsing through your friends’ submissions.

Simply clicking the Next button, you will be taken to the next story of your friends’ submissions automatically. With the List view, you can also view all submissions with the ability of sorting and filtering as well.

And also, they have released another Digg Tool called Fan.Diggerplus.com. It helps you optimize your friend list, so that you know which of your friends are still active in Digg. It analyze our recent submissions and give you a detailed report which of your friends have / have not dug your recent submissions.

Once you are using both tools, you can have a list of most active friends on Digg that digg your submissions daily. And also you can keep track your friends’ submissions without wasting diggs on non-active Digg friends.

Now, WordPress is upping your Gravatar Profile to a new level of awesomeness with Gravatar Hovercards. It’s now easy to find out about who is behind your favorite comments on WordPress.com simply by moving your mouse over their Gravatar.

Gravatar Hovercards show information about a person: name, bio, pictures, and their contact info at other services they use on the web like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. As a commenter, Hovercards offer a great way to show your Internet presence and help people find your own blog. If you’re a blogger on WordPress.com, you can quickly check out who’s commenting on your blog, and have an easier time connecting with them.

Source: Gravatar Hovercards on WordPress.com

Private cloud hosting is a highly modern hosting format that represents the best in hosting scalability and optimization of virtual resources. Private cloud hosting removes the dependence on a singular physical web server and focuses the process of web hosting through a selection of linked servers that work together to provide you with the hosting resources you need to operate your online content.

Private Cloud Hosting Features

Private cloud hosting is essentially the linking of multiple server clouds to create a centralized pool of web server resources. Each cloud is an individual server and when linked together, they form a private cloud host network. When utilizing private cloud hosting, you receive access to more than one web server at all times and can use the hosting resources from many servers to expand your online content or scale your hosting resources to match your website needs without paying for unused server space.

The features of private cloud hosting provide you with a hardwire and virtualized linked system where you have enough computing power and resources to manage your online content and engage in expansion without being limited to a single physical dedicated server or sharing space with other clients on a shared hosting plan. (more…)

WordPress is one of the best CMSs out there — if not the best (but of course, I’m biased because I’m a WordPress fanatic). It has loads of handy features that make site administration a breeze. WordPress is a publishing platform with a comment system, a GUI for creating, editing and managing posts and pages, handy built-in tools like the “Export” feature to back up your content, user roles and permissions, and more.

But how much of these features do we really use? Though already simple and user-friendly by default, we might want to Customize the WordPress Admin interface to make it even simpler and more manageable for our clients, our co-authors, and ourselves.

Source: How to Customize the WordPress Admin Area