We have come across several video tutorials/screencasts on doing literally everything with WordPress and thought it would be a good idea to have them all compiled in one place. This post will be constantly updated. So here you go:

• WordPress has recently launched a official site that houses categorized how-to videos. This should be the first stop if you are looking for video instructions on WordPress.

  Check out wordpress.tv.

• There’s a good number of videos at this site as well.

INSTALLATION

• WordPress installation on localhost on a MAC using MAMP:

  [blip.tv ?posts_id=1712286&dest=-1]

  Source

ADMINISTRATION AND USAGE

• Installing Plugins
• Understanding the Admin Panel and Template Files

  [blip.tv ?posts_id=1725030&dest=-1]

  Source

• WordPress widgets
• Working with Plugins
• AdSense Deluxe WordPress Plugin installation and configuration
• Working With Images In A WordPress Post
• Working with RSS Feeds
• Working with Widgets

CUSTOMIZATION

• Custom WordPress Page Template
• Adding links in WordPress footer

  Source

• Working with Graphics (changing the header image)
• Working with CSS stylesheets
• Working with code (adding code to sidebar)
• How to turn WP into a CMS
• Customizing Login Graphic
• Working with 404 Pages

THEME DEVELOPMENT

• Creating a Theme From Scratch

  [blip.tv ?posts_id=1744206&dest=-1]

  Source

Please do post in the comments if you know more videos on WordPress so I can add them to the list.

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The solution is to turn on mod_rewrite by editing apache/conf/httpd.conf. Just remove the comment in front of the line (around line #118) and restart Apache.

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Credit.

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Listed below are top 10 reasons why you would want to use Windows Live Writer:

1. No need to save the images first and then insert into the post you are composing. Have a screenshot or image in the clipboard? Just paste it in.
2. Image resizing. Can your blog hold only images up to 500px wide? No problem. For an image that’s wider than what can be fit in the content area of your blog, simply specify the width, 500px for example and the height will automatically be proportionally set. The thumbnail will automatically be linked to the full sized image (the link can of course be removed easily from ‘Link to’ dropdown).
   
3. Ability to specify whether the images should automatically be uploaded to your blog or to any FTP server. Hence there’s no need to upload your images separately to sites like Imageshack.
4. Twitter plugin. Just before a post is published to your blog, Twitter plugin will bring up a dialog box in which a TinyURL of your blog post link is present. You can edit the tweet and publish it to your Twitter.
    
   Twitter plugin for Windows Live Writer can be installed by following this guide.
5. The ability to select existing categories and create new ones right from the program interface.
   
6. Image layout options: Inline, Left, Right, Center; We can also set custom margins on all the 4 sides for an image.

   Windows Live Writer has multiple options for borders:
   
   Most of the images inside posts in this blog just as the one above uses ‘Drop Shadow’ border.

7. Need to go out in the middle of writing your post? Windows Live Writer has that taken care of. Just hit Ctrl+S and a draft of your post is saved so you can always revisit and continue where you left off.
   
8. The ability to add multiple blogs. Simply select the blog that you want to publish to in the top right dropdown.
    
9. Rich text editor. Just like in MS Word, you can Ctrl+B to bold text, Ctrl+U to underline, Ctrl+I to italicize etc. Quotation marks, Ordered and unordered lists work great too.
    
   The keyboard shortcut to hyperlink a word is Ctrl+K.
10. You can preview how your post looks as if it’s posted in ‘Preview’ tab and edit the HTML source in ‘Source’ tab.
    

Other notable features

• Integrated spell checker: Although this is not as great as the one in Firefox, something is better than nothing. The spell checker fails to recognize some common program and Internet-related terms. If my memory serves right, it flags ‘Google’ and ‘Firefox’ as misspellings (can’t verify any more since I have them added to its correction list).
• Interface automatically shows your blog’s theme and imports the stylesheet. So you actually feel that you are directly typing inside your blog in the font style of your blog.
  
• You can insert tables, maps, tags, videos, code snippets and more.
  
• Has proxy support so you can for example, blog from your office as well.

Conclusion

Windows Live Writer makes blogging easy and fast so ultimately you write more in less time. No more fiddling with image resizing, manual uploading and clumsy feature-less editing. Writing blog posts inside it as easy as using MS Word. If you are still using the editor of your native blogging platform, it’s time to give Windows Live Writer a try. You will like it.

Windows Live Writer Home Page

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Widgetbox has launched a network for bloggers for traffic exchange. It is a good way of bringing targeted traffic to your blog while sending out traffic to others in the process. You can see the widget in action at the right side of this post and also in the sidebar.

Here’s how it works:

1. Select the channel (topic) of your blog from 29 categories. Ex.: Art, Autos, Business, Celebrity, Education, Tech Gadgets, Tech News.
2. Create a free account or log in if you already a Widgetbox member.
3. Click on the link to create a new Blidget (a fancy term for ‘blog widget’)
   
   Make sure that you provide an image/logo for your blog since it will appear to the left side (with the latest post title to the right) in the widget on others’ (in the same channel) blogs.
4. Once your Blidget is ready, click on the link to join Widgetbox network. Select the appropriate channel and click ‘Generate Network Widget’.
5. Install the Network widget on your blog by pasting the generated code in the sidebar template of your blog.

That’s it. It may take up to an hour before your blog will appear on other blogs in the network. The widget is live on this blog and can be seen in the first sidebar at the bottom.

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I sent a test mail to the above mail address from my Gmail and received the following instantly:

By clicking on the last link, I could go ahead and set up my user account at posterous.

Posterous handles youtube URLs, images and mp3s files intelligently.

• Youtube URLs will get auto embedded and playable in your blog.
• Images will be resized for web and an image gallery will be created when more than one image is sent as attachments via e-mail.
• Each mp3 file will also get its own audio player w/ the play, stop and pause button.

For more, check out their FAQ.

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Advanced-Admin-Menus: This plugin introduces drop down menus in the WordPress admin. Now any action is just a mouse hover and click away. For example: To go to Permalinks, you don’t have to click on Options before you can see the Permalinks menu item. Just put your mouse on the Options menu and in the dropdown menu that comes up, select Permalinks.

Akismet: This comes by default with WordPress now a days. Akismet is all you need to tackle and control the spam on your WordPress blog. Ensure that you update it to the most latest version (simply overwrite akismet.php). You need to register for a free API key that you can get from wordpress.com.

All in One SEO Pack: This plugin lets you enter your blog’s homepage title, description and keywords. Also it adds two fields in the post/page editor in which you can type in keywords and a description. Even without any configuration, this does truly provide a Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. Note that post/page tags act as keywords. Hence there is no need to enter them in the keywords field.

BackUpWordPress: Setting up periodic and automatic backups for your blog is extremely important. BackUpWordPress is a handy plugin using which you can have either your entire blog (files and database) or just the database automatically backed up to a directory in your web space. This plugin also provides an option to have these backups emailed to you (the maximum file size can be entered and only if the backup is less than this will it be mailed to you.

Contact Form ][: Offers a simple drop-in contact form in any new/existing post/page.

Embedify: This is the easiest way to embed YouTube videos in your blog. Just copy the URI of the YouTube video and paste it into the body of your post for the video to appear.

Exclude Pages from Navigation: There might be times when you create a page in your blog but then you don’t want this to appear alongside other pages in the menu. This plugin provides a checkbox that you can tick to exclude a page from the navigation.

FeedBurner FeedSmith: It’s a good idea to use Feedburner to manage your blog’s feed so you can publicize it, track your blog feed’s subscribers and set up ads in the feed. This plugin simply redirects all the default RSS feed links of your blog to your blog’s feed that you should set up at Feedburner. No more editing your theme’s files manually.

Google XML Sitemaps: This generates a sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Use this in conjunction with Google’s webmaster tools.

Pagebar: ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ at the bottom of WordPress index page, search and archive pages don’t make much sense. A visitor might wonder if he will be going to entries that you wrote in the past or future. Pagebar replaces the standard WordPress navigation with numbers. WPPageNavi is a similar plugin.

ShareThis: Lets your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Slimbox: This is a lighter version of Lightbox plugin for WordPress. Provides a neat effect for images on your blog to show up in a transparent popup overlay. An alternative is the HighSlide JS Plugin.

SRG Clean Archives: Displays your archive listings in a clean, uniform, single-query fashion that’s search engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.

Subscribe To Comments: Want to provide an option for your blog commentators to be notified via e-mail when a reply is posted to their comment? This plugin takes care of that for you automatically (no theme editing required).

SyntaxHighlighter Plus: This plugin comes handy when you want to show code in your blog posts or pages.

WP Super Cache: This supersedes the WP-Cache plugin. WP Super Cache speeds up your blog by making your web server serve HTML files instead of the heavier PHP files to your visitors.

Need a plugin for a different purpose than the above? Just head over to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ or our collection at del.icio.us.

Further Reading:

• Top 30 Wordpress Plugins that are actually useful!
• Must-have Plugins for WordPress
• Top Wordpress Plugins for the Smart Blogger
• TOP 30 Wordpress Plugins in Blogosphere
• Plugins used by ‘Anthology of Ideas’ blog

Remember to always keep your plugins updated to the latest version for security reasons.

Do you think we missed out a important plugin that should be in the list? Do let us know by commenting.

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