Archive for March, 2007

WordPress.com Tutorials have Arrived!

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

I am pleased to post these tutorials that I have been working on for the last few weeks.  These are something that took a lot of time to do since Camtasia Studio was giving me a little problems and then my hosting solution had to change over as well.  I have decided to post these all in one post and have included iPod forms as well.  Please let me know what you think about these and if you have ideas on other tutorial series that you would like to see please let me know and I’ll look at working on them.

Tutorial 1

Tutorial 2

Tutorial 3

Tutorial 4

iPod format

Tumblr and Twitter!

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

I had a friend email me a couple of cool sites the past few days and wanted to share them with you. First off is Twitter. Twitter is a social networking service that allows members to inform each other about what they are doing and what they think. It allows users to send message via phone, IM, or the twitter website. Users can receive updates from other selected users via web, IM, or SMS. Here’s my twitter URL. Feel free to add me if you have an account or create one!

My next site I wanted to share with you is Tumblr. Tumblr is like blogging, but a variation of it. It favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common posts formats found on tumblr include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video.  Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing commentary. You can visit my tumblr here.

I have an update with my WordPress tutorails I wanted to mention as well.  I promised in my last post that they were done, however, they have not been posted yet.  That’s because I had trouble getting them to my hosting service.  I was going to use DreamHost, which is my hosting provider, but I have decided to use Screencast.com which is a hosting service from TechSmith Corporation, the makers of Camtasia Studio, which is what I used to create these tutorials.  So I will be creating links to these here very quickly.

WordPress Tutorials Update

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

So I had a few people ask about the WordPress tutorials and I wanted to let everyone know that they are done, but I ran into a few snags with getting everything working right with Camtasia Studio, which is what I recorded them in.  I think I have everything working ok now and I will be posting them shortly.  I won’t go into all the issues I had, but I did have some time to edit them so I think you will like these.  One thing I learned in this series is that I use “um” a lot, so the next series I do I will plan a little more and work on not using “um”.

WordPress - Just Another WordPress Blog??

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Today I thought I would talk about WordPress and the creator of WordPress. WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is the official successor of b2\cafelog and has a thriving user and developer community. It is  distributed under the GNU General Public License, so WordPress is free software. Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, the popular open-source blogging software. He has devoted most of his time to developing numerous open-source projects. He was recruited by CNET to work on WordPress for them and to help them with blogs. WordPress appeared in early 2003. It currently only supports one weblog or site per installation, but there is a multi-user version available called WordPress MU.

WordPress can either be downloaded or installed on your own web server, or you can create a fee hosted WordPress blog at WordPress.com. I will be focusing on WordPress.com and their features they offer first

  • It only takes seconds to get your blog up and running!
  • Dozens of Themes to choose from.
  • Ability to Categorize and Tag Your Posts
  • Spell-check, Previews, Autosave, Words, Photos, Videos
  • Lots of Privacy Options, including Members-Only Blogs
  • Integrated Stats System
  • Automatic Spam Protection
  • Ability to Import from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and more.
  • A Great Blogging Community
  • Sidebar Widgets for Flickr, del.icio.us, Meebo, and More!
  • Manage Regular Pages, not Just Blog Posts
  • Feed Stats, Export, and so much more!!!

Now you may be thinking, well do I really need all that? You may be also thinking what are all these things that you are talking about? Well over the next few weeks we will be going through setting up a blog from WordPress.com, choosing a theme, setting up categories, creating pages, and working through your first post. Feel free to comment or send me some feedback to feedback[at]techtalknews.com.