Free Technology Tutorials

I’ll be lurking in the #blogchat discussion tonight on #twitter and the topic of discussion is “favorite blog plugins”. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized it’s hard to identify my favorite plugins–I use a lot of different plugins on different sites depending on a lot of variables. However, in the spirit of sharing, here are some of my favorites/most used blog (WordPress) plugins — in no particular order:  Read more... (412 words, 2 images, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

The video in this post is a follow-up to the last video I published here about creating a members only WordPress blog. In that video I briefly demonstated a WordPress plugin that allows you to upload a csv file of and create tens of thousands users in a matter of minutes. In this video, I demonstrate how to create that csv file of users with MS Excel. The video is a bit long…I’m sure given a lot of planning and thought I could have demonstrated this in under 10 minutes, but since I can now upload videos of unlimited length to YouTube, and since I no longer have the time to spend hours on creating these, my videos will tend to be a bit longer these days. The upside is, in this video, you should not only learn a thing or two about WordPress, but you may pick up a few Excel tips that could come in handy in several different applications–I demonstrate the use of the “text to columns”, “concatenate”, and “past values only” functions in Excel that are extremely useful. Anyway, enjoy.

In the video above I demonstrate how to close a WordPress blog to the public and make it available only to members who have a username and password created for them by the blog administrator. The site I demonstrate has 49,500 members that I created and bulk uploaded in about an hour. I show the plugin I used for the bulk upload of users. I’ll create a follow-up video in a week or so demonstrating how I used Excel to create those users from a file with nothing but first and last names. If you have need for a private blog/website to share with a few people or tens of thousands of people, this should help get you started.

In the video below I demonstrate how to take a full backup of your WordPress blog before upgrading so that you will have everything you need just in case the upgrade breaks your site and you need to get back to where you were. One of the biggest mistakes people make when upgrading their site is to just trust that everything will go well and fail to make a good backup. Don’t be a victim…you may make a hundred backups you never need, but one day you will need one.

If you don’t currently have your WordPress blog configured to render on mobile devi ces, then watch this video for directions on using the WPTouch plugin. In only a few minutes you have configure your blog to render very nicely on a variety of smartphones.

I was helping a real estate agent move and clean up some problems with his WordPress site this week. He also wanted a better way of listing properties. After looking around a bit at different themes, I stumbled across the WP-Property plugin…in a word…very nice. Okay, two words

If you’re looking for a nice, easy way to list properties, check it out…with a little creativity you could probably think of lots of other uses for this cool plugin as well.

http://twincitiestech.com/plugins/wp-property/

How to Install a WordPress Theme Using FTP or Cpanel

How to Install a WordPress Plugin Using FTP or Cpanel