Latest helpful links I have come across since the last batch of shared links. Enjoy!

Twitter Tips for Beginners [VIDEO] from the amazing Darren Rowse (Problogger). This is actually more oriented for business use of Twitter. 

13 Tips For A Better E-Commerce Website

20 Nice Free Handwritten Fonts – it is amazing the fonts you can get for free!

SEOmoz | New Mozbar – I use SEObook’s toolbar but this may someday be a good alternative. Any opinions? (both are Firefox only)

WordPress Resources – 48 Resources, Tips, Tricks & Themes | Think Design – has some great WordPress dev. blogs ( I am subscribed to most of them) and tutorials.

Themes

15+ High Quality Free WordPress Themes Released in June-July 2009

Brownie WordPress Theme 

FreeStyle WordPress Theme 

Plugins

45+ Essential WordPress Plugins for Pro Blogging | Blog Perfume

WordPress › Quick Search « WordPress Plugins – suggests search terms as you type.

WordPress › Dashboard Notepad « WordPress Plugins – leave notes in WP backend.

WordPress › WP Pubsubhubbub « WordPress Plugins – New Google technology.

WordPress Plugin Competition Blog » Section Widget for your section-specific needs

Best Commercial WordPress Plugins: Ultimate Review List – two of the best WordPress E-commerce plugins are in this post.

Bonus Tool

Spam-me-not – e-mail link obfuscator – I use this to build mailto: links that are not easily scrapable by spam bots.

Please send me a message or leave a comment if this type of post is useful to you. Or is this unwanted content?

Thanks for reading. Shared Links – new WP plugins & more is a post from Blake Imeson

From my ramblings through the never-ending fields of internet information…

• 3 Forum Search Engines to Search 40.000+ Message Boards
• The Ultimate List of Basic SEO Resources for a Kick-Ass Start
• WooCamp Blog – WordPress

Themes

• Aubogasta WordPress theme

Plugins

• CMS plugins for WordPress
• CMS plugins for WordPress part 2
• CMS Plugins for WordPress, part 3
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• 5 Fresh WordPress Plugins Ready to Enhance Your Blog

Bonus :)

The Word of Mouth KFC challenge

Check out my new partnership.  I build/manage this blog, Scott writes the killer content. Sweet deal. Phone Savant | Tips, Tricks & Reviews. Amplify Your Mobile Life.

Spread the love!

Thanks for reading. Shared Links – Spread the Love is a post from Blake Imeson

I am going to try and save some cool links as I come across them and share them every week or two. No sense everyone reading so many feeds ;)

Gems from around the web.

If you can’t find an icon set for your blog here then you have problems.

72 Sets of Free Social Bookmarking Icons

Good point about corporate social media expectations: Social Media Doesn’t Work

Plugins

• Manage Your Post Templates Easily
• I have been trying to find a good WP plugin to showcase Google analytics in the WordPress dashboard. I like this one but it has been throwing harmless error messages which is annoying. Google Analytics Dashboard plugin It does show top keywords driving traffic to your site. This API is still fairly new so I am waiting to see what improvements come out.

Themes

• 40 Free Premium-Quality WordPress Themes – I especially like this new theme: Androida
• 21 Mindblowing Premium-Like Free WordPress Themes
• 23 WordPress Themes for your Website
• Another decent blog theme TweetSheep Magazine theme
• Nice grunge theme:  Free WordPress Theme: Paper Wall

Where this blog is at…

I have published 25 posts. And even better, there are now 57 comments! Thanks for sharing your wisdom and thoughts.

This site has evolved and changed just as I have, in the kind of things I am doing and interested in. Namely, as I have become more obsessed with WordPress, so it has been reflected here. I have helped many friends and clients start their own WordPress sites and these posts have been written chiefly to them.

Stats

1. Active over a year and a half.
2. 25 published posts
3. 57 published comments
4. Now a Page Rank of 4! (more than it deserves, thanks Google!)
5. 80+ RSS subscribers. (see counter below)  If you haven’t already, please subscribe to my feed!

The top 3 posts have been:

21 LinkedIn Hacks, Tricks and Ways to Make Your Profile Better

Ultimate Guide to Self-Hosting WordPress

Start a Personal Resume/Portfolio Site, Here’s how.

Thank you all so much for your support and for encouraging me to share stuff on here. I hope it has been of value and I look forward to writing more in the future.

-Blake

Thanks for reading. Shared links and State of the Blog is a post from Blake Imeson

Anyone who has had a blog hacked or files/database corrupted, knows the horrible feeling in your gut and the awful mess trying to recover.

To solve this I have found a great way to make sure you don’t end up in a bad situation.

The 2 WordPress Plugins

1. WP-DB-Backup – Allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

2. WordPress Backup – Backup the upload directory (images), current theme directory, and plugins directory to a zip file. Zip files optionally sent to email.

The first plugin backs up your database. The second, backs up the files that are added to your particular WordPress installation.

Use a Gmail account for storage

Get a Gmail account. I created a special backup account to use for all my client’s sites. You could use an existing one.  If using an existing one, create a filter to archive emails that have “WordPress Backup” in the subject line and an attachment.

Set both plugins to automatically email a backup at a certain interval. I set mine for a week but you may want more often. With Gmail’s 7gb+ storage capacity, space isn’t an issue. Every few months delete the old backups. (Know a way to do this automatically?)

Update: Nathan suggests in the comments: “you could create a filter that moves these backups directly to the trash. They’ll be auto-deleted after 30 days. It’s not a huge window, but it would suffice for a basic backup strategy.”

Update 2: Lifehacker says: “I send my backups to my spam folder. Since items in the spam folder automatically delete after 30 days, I always have 30 days worth of backups quietly tucked away in my Gmail account.”

This is useless if you don’t know how to restore your site if it fails. Use PHPMyAdmin to restore the database. (or use the wp-phpmyadmin plugin) The WordPress files reside in the wp-content folder, it is simple FTP work to restore them.  It is a good idea to know how to do this before you have to figure it out in an emergency. You may want to create a dummy WordPress install in a subdirectory and try restoring after deleting some of the database and wp-content folder.

Have a WordPress backup story to share? Got a different way? Sound off in the comments!

Thanks for reading. Backup WordPress = 2 Plugins + Gmail is a post from Blake Imeson

Inspired by the venerable Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and his post, 2009: Products I Can’t Live Without I decided it would be fun to just jot down a short list of the types of technology I depend on daily to be efficient.

I don’t usually like to do too many of these kinds of posts but I know sometimes people get a kick out of a post that is a bit more personal. I have some posts coming down the line that are going to be more helpful. :)

Here goes. Rough order from most important to least…

(All of these are free except OneNote.)

Tool I am most excited about,  new in 2008: EtherPad. This is like a live version of Google Docs and lets several people work on a simple text doc and see the text instantaneously. It is in closed beta due to overwhelming demand.

If you really want to try it and can’t get in LMK and I may be able to help you.

I decided to exercise some self-control and only bore you with 15. You’re welcome lol.Watch out for 2009. Have any favorites you want to share?

Thanks for reading. Technology I can’t “live” without… is a post from Blake Imeson