I am regularly asked with these questions.
So, I thought of telling about it here.

A Blog is a Journal or Diary that is available on the Web. The activity of
updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger”.
Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allow people with
little or no technical background to maintain or add to their blogs with
just the push of a button.

Did you know that some 80,000 blogs are created each day and the number is multiplying? Statistics that many of these blogs are updated regularly. Some 13% of blogs are updated weekly. Check out the Picture to see it yourself.

The number is expected to grow into millions soon. If you are reading this and dont have a blog yet, you can think of it. The total number of blogs according to Technorati is 16.1 million as on date. I love wordpress and can do a free install and some customization for you, if you are intrested. But will do that only if you promise me that you will blog regularly and dont keep it like a dead site.

I am a great fan of blogging even though I have started it lately.
I have decided to do few things to help others who are intrested in blogging.
Mean while, you might want to know how good each blogging tool is.
You might be convinced to use one of these systems for your corporate website too.

Checkout this website which has each and every detail:
Click to see the review!
Though its a old review, you can decide your blogging tool seeing that review.
I appreciate Owen’s effort and patience.

EFL.org has a good guide to new bloggers about what you should think before posting something on your blog.

I am not sure if there are such laws in India.
But if you are a US citizen, you got to read this.
The site says ….Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post……………..EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

Here is the link: Legal Guide for Bloggers

In one line, its one of the cool firefox extentions for webmasters.

Created by Allen Holman, its one of the most popular and useful plugins among the blogging plugins for Firefox.

If you are using Firefox browser and have adsense ads running on your websites, whitout this plugin, I say you are missing a lot.

Look at these screenshots:
1. Firefox status bar earnings display:

2. Firefox adsense extension settings window:

I’m going to watch the numbers changing now

You can check out Allen Holman’s website for the extension here:
Google Adsense Earnings Notifier

Authored by Arne Brachhold in the early days of the Google SiteMaps release by Google. This plugin is so famous that almost everyone who is aware of the importance of the Search Engine Registration, listings and rankings uses it these days.

I feel this is one of those plugins which makes wordpress the best among the blogging tools.
I have just started using it. But I was using Google SiteMaps since its lauch in the first week of june 2005 for many of the sites that I work on

You can download the latest version of this plugin here: download 2.7
You can view the complete log of the development here: final release
Take a look at the Screenshot.

Being a wordpress plugin and giving 100% support to the wordpress blog, the coolest thing about this plugin is that we can also add pages that are not generated by wordpress. That means if you have a page like http://www.mydomain.com/flash/index.html which is not generated by wordpress(http://www.mydomain.com/blog/), you can add this page too in the plugin’s admin panel and the plugin pings google via google-pings telling the changes in the site.

Cool isnt’it?

Wondering where your .htaccess is gone in the wordpress root directory you recently installed ? Well, I was wondering too when I installed wordpress. I did’nt know about remote masks. Its very simple actually.You just need to set a remote mask value. If you are using WS_FTP software as your FTP tool, then this can be done by going to the Startup tab in the Connect dialog box. In the create site or Edit site box, you will find a menu item called ‘startup’, in startup, find Remote Mask and fill its field with -la and save the settings and you are done. Re-connect to the ftp and you will find your .htaccess file.

Some useful links:
http://www.efficienthosting.co.uk/support/wsftp.html
http://www.nexusportal.net/support/general-hosting/ftp/win/wsftple.html
http://www.nexusportal.net/support/general-hosting/ftp/win/wsftppro.html

This is the place where I test wordpress plugins….
Currently testing the IMBD plug-in.

As Earth is invaded by alien tripod fighting machines, one family fights for survival.

Directed by
Steven Spielberg

Genres
Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Cast
Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins, Rick Gonzalez, Yul Vazquez, Lenny Venito, Lisa Ann Walter, Ann Robinson, Gene Barry, David Alan Basche, Roz Abrams, Michael Brownlee, Camillia Sanes

The wp-amazon test:

I love spending time listening to Monkey Business Album.

Testing Amazon for book:

Search Engine Visibility
Author: Shari Thurow
Rating: 5

Testing AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin
This is how your google adsense in your blog will look like :
You can change the color of the text and the border in your adsense account.
This is a Large Rectangle (336×280) – View sample placements

You can see more formats here: https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats.