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5

Wordpress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide Book Review

December
7

PacktPublishing sent me a shiny new publication called Wordpress MU 2.8. It’s one of their “beginners guide” series which means it takes you step by step from noob to hero on the subject. I’ve read a few of their other books and they’ve always been a good read and source of new information.

Wordpress Mu or WPMu is already familiar to me after creating ComLuv.com to run using it so I was looking forward to receiving this book to see if there were some things I had missed. Oh yeah, I missed a lot!

If you’re looking to build a Wordpress based site that also has the option of allowing your own readers to create their own blogs then you need to look at WPMu. Not only is it the same platform that wordpress.com uses for their millions of blogs, it’s also expandable to be a social network in it’s own right. It does this with the buddypress and bbpress plugins. This book shows you how to use them all.

In the beginning

Like all beginner books, the first part deals with the introduction and installation chapters. In other books, this is just a page or two but with PacktPub books, you get the full deal. Step by step with pictures and alternative methods. Even right down to setting up Apache to work with subdomains which is going to save you a lot of trouble hunting around forums for answers.

Expansion

After you learn how to set up your site and modify it’s appearance, you’ll want to know what plugins and features can be added. The middle section of the book takes you through different options like buddypress, bbpress (forums) and other useful additions that will make your site stand out from the rest.

As with other beginners guide books, the author works with a case study site and as you progress through the chapters adding more things, you will be able to follow on with your own local install and compare results. This makes it a lot more interactive to learn and with the pop quizzes and “what just happened” reviews, you’ll really prepare yourself for your project.

More than words..

As well as covering the technical details for installing, maintaining and optimizing your site, the author also goes into the real life way of creating and running a blog/social network hub. Things like monetizing your site or ways to increase traffic are given a whole chapter and will really help the new webmaster get to grips with their site.

thinking Mu?

If you’re just considering looking into WPMu or you run more than one wordpress blog and want to consolidate them all to one site then you should buy yourself this book. It’ll give you enough information so that you can try it out without worrying about having to bring in outside help. You can view the books contents page and read more about it here :

Wordpress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide

Reviews

3

PacktPub contest winners

January
20

phew, I have managed to get back to the pc after a little while away and just in time (well, close) to announce the winners of the PacktPub contest.

All someone had to do was visit the PacktPub website and choose a book they want to win, link to it in the comments and post about the contest on their site.

First winner is Dominique Goh from http://www.dominiquegoh.com/ who wins a Wordpress Theme Design book by Tessa Blakeley Silver

Second winner is Kelly from http://www.myqute.com who wins the Wordpress for Business bloggers book.

well done you two! I’ll send your email addresses to packtpub tomorrow (just time for you to change your mind about which book if you email me quickly) and they will send you your books as a PDF attachment soon after.

Blog News, contests

32

Wordpress for business bloggers book review

December
19

The nice folks at PacktPub sent me a pretty good book called “Wordpress For Business Bloggers” by Paul Thewlis. I’ve been reading it for a couple of weeks and it turned out to be an excellent read.

Who is it for?

It makes it clear in the beginning of the book that you should at least be familiar with Wordpress as a blogging platform. It doesn’t expect you to know any HTML or PHP skills, just a working knowledge of the WP interface for adding posts and pages, activating plugins and general use.

The book says it is aimed at anyone running or starting a business blog using Wordpress. It can be for PR, marketing, profit or driving traffic. Whatever you use it for, if it’s for a business then this book is for you.

My own addition to this is that it will be perfect for someone who runs their own personal blog and is used to people asking them blogging questions. Why? because with this book, you could move from doing minor updates to personal blogs to heading up a business blog for your workplace or local businesses. You will see why below…

The Plan

One of the things that really impressed me with this book was how Paul gives good examples of specifics, what makes a great blog is the first question covered in the book. It doesn’t try to explain from the beginning what a blog is which would take a whole book but instead, it gives an example of different blogs that are aimed at;

  • Increasing sales
  • Adding value
  • A dialog with your customers
  • Raising awareness
  • Showing expertise
  • Customer Service
  • Public relations
  • Driving Traffic

The first chapter will give you an excellent summary of what you will learn from reading the rest of the book including, monetization, promotion and statistics.

The Case Study

This is where the real value of the book comes into play. So many “how to blog” books and blogs don’t go into specifics. They go on about how you should do this and that but not exactly how to go about doing this and that!.

The Wordpress for business bloggers book has it’s own case study site to take you from planning (including strategic goals, tactical goals and implementation) all the way through from Chapter 3 – Designing your blog, how to install to your local machine so you can develop a blog before it goes live to blog design principles, layout, typography, colors.

Images, video and content are all covered in chapters 4 and 5. I was really impressed by the content of these chapters, every sub heading had a gold mine of information associated with it and was able to cover a large amount of the whole blogging for business idea without getting too wordy or cluttered with random information. It’s quite clear that Paul knows an awful lot about blogging and Wordpress!

Through each chapter you get to work on the case study and see it grow as you complete each chapter and learn how each new bit of information gets applied to a real blog.

Why would you buy it?

Far from being just for business bloggers, I think this book would be an excellent resource for anyone wanting to know a bit more about blogging. All the information and guidelines would be applicable to any new blog.

You could even use this book as a self study course, work through each chapter and follow the case study and by the end, you will not only know how to make a full site but, you will know why you put headings here, how you should respond to comments, what to do with SEO and how to apply it and much more.

The case study site is quite simple and will give you a good ‘heads up’ on how to add and remove items from an existing theme so you could adapt a regular theme to word specifically for your business.
The code is available to download from the packtpub website.

If you’re working for your company and they don’t have a blog, just the information in Chapter 1 and 2 about mapping out a strategic plan and how to implement solutions would arm you with enough ‘know-how’ to talk your boss into getting your company into blogging. And wouldn’t it be nice if you knew just how to start? :-)

Click here for Wordpress For Business Bloggers

Get ANY book from PacktPub for FREE

Being the nice folks that they are, Packtpub has offered up 2 books from their vast collection as ebook downloads. My first packtpub book was an ebook and from it, I learned all that I needed to know about wordpress design so I really recommend that you enter this contest!

Requirements

  1. Visit the PacktPub website and browse their collection and leave a comment here with what book you would like to win.
    (link to the books page at packtpub if you like)
  2. Write about this contest on your own blog and link to this post.
    (it doesn’t have to be a whole post, it can be included as part of a new post but mention “wordpress for business bloggers” or “packtpub” in the paragraph and link directly to this post)

Details
Contest will run until Jan 16th 2009.
Winners will be chosen by a magic script at Random.org
Please use an email address that you can be contacted on when you comment, this email address will be used to receive the ebook

Blog News, Reviews

40

A great book for wordpress theme design

November
15


Wordpress Theme Design – Tessa Blakeley Silver
PacktPublishing
Price 35.99 USD (ebook $27.19)

I bought a book recently after seeing it mentioned in the WP dashboard news items, it’s called Wordpress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver and although a lot of the information regarding the functions of wordpress can be found at the codex, the book gives you so much more like the process gone through to design a theme from scratch.

I do quite a lot of sites in wordpress now and find it much easier to provide a client with a website that can be updated so easily, a few plugins here and there and you can provide a website that does all and more that’s needed.

Usually I get a standard theme and cut it up a bit and change the css to give me my site, or create in photoshop and send off for wordpressing but lately due to some more custom design requests I’ve received and the always dependable mistakes that freelancers can make I have wanted to do the whole thing myself from scratch..

I’ve downloaded a tutorial before about WP theme design from small potato before it was taken over and that was pretty darn useful but was made a little while ago so it wasn’t 2.5 specific.

That’s why I like what Tessa has put her book, it takes you step by step through the process of creating a non-blog wordpress blog, from sketch to WP core code. It’s made a big difference to my initial prototyping of concept sites and has really opened my eyes to what you can do with a bit of manipulation of the wordpress template tags. I’m even working on a magazine style front page for here so I can have a featured post for contests that stays up while it’s open for entries as well as excerpts to the regular posts..

You can buy the book printed or get it as pdf for a bit cheaper (I printed mine out from pdf on someone elses printer lol!) at packet publishing

Packtpublishing is sending me a new book about Wordpress For Business Bloggers , they’re offering a deal if you get both books together. Stay tuned for the review of the new book!

Audio, Reviews, VWD elottery, Wordpress, books

Comments Off

3 Recent Sci fi Books I would recommend

December
9
This was a surprise, I originally bought it from an ebook store so I could read it on my HTC device, it turned out to be a really good book! I didn’t realize until much later that it was based around the mass effect game

It was a nicely technical read and described how humans were using the alien Mass Effect devices to travel between the stars and what happened when they inevitably ‘bumped’ into the neighbors and started a fight. Typical Humans :-)

This was a wonderfully wonderful book. Again, I downloaded it for my HTC. The author has made it available online at his website for free, you can download Postsingular in PRC, PDF or TXT. I used the PRC format on MobiReader and it was very easy to read. You can read Rudy Ruckers’ Blog here

The story deals with what happens to human society after the Singularity of the development of AI and nanotech. The first three chapters could have been an entire novel by themselves and I would have been happy. This is not written in the same way as the other books here, it deals with something that would cause such a dramatic change in human behavior it would be hard to imagine.

Rucker deals with this in a fantastic way, my only disappointment was when there was no more book to read!

My friend gave me this for my Birthday and I’ve just gotten around to reading it. I wanted to save it for a time when I could give it the attention a Richard Morgan book deserves.

It is based around a character who is known as a ‘Thirteen’, a genetically engineered human who was part of a series of experiments to find a way to breed a human as ruthless and alpha as those found over 40,000 years ago before we became domesticated. An intelligent monster, feared around the globe.

This is a detective novel set in the future, I’d like to say Bladerunner but this book is far more deep, as with other Morgan books, it does get a bit political but that only helps to weave the background to the rest of the story and characters.

As a side note, I used to work with the Authors sister. I’m like almost famous. :-)

All three of these books are worth buying for a loved geek or sci-fi fan, I really enjoyed them all immensely.

Reviews, books