Anything in the bookstore with WordPress in the title prompts me to stop and take a second look; which is what happened yesterday. Web Designer magazine has a new “Wordpress Wizard” issue featuring an interview with WP co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The interview offers plenty of insight into the future of online publishing, in addition to discussing Mullenweg’s open source commitment and enthusiasm for listening to the blogging community.
This issue (#167) also presents tutorials on understanding how to use transparent PNG files for enhanced design options and creating cool graphic effects on your site. If you want to know how to save an image with a transparent background (using Photoshop), I think this will be very help. So if you’re a WordPress blogger and Web Designer fan like me, definitely check out this issue!
Unlike the title suggests, I read WordPress 24-Hour Trainer through a course of many sittings. It took me a little less than a week to finish this book. So don’t plan to learn this all in a day, unless of course you have a photographic memory and prior experience with all the functions of the WordPress interface. Then again, it might just be me. While I don’t speed read, I also don’t read terribly slow.
While I feel the title is a bit misleading, this resource is worth it. Debateable book premise aside, George Plumley explains everything clearly from major concepts to tedious procedures. Having used WordPress for a while now, I thought I knew most of the features of this rather intuitive platform. Nonetheless, Plumley’s work presents many insights into optimizing content and planning posts.
WordPress 24-Hour Trainer begins by explaining how WordPress “thinks” from search engine standpoints. Not only is this important for sharing work, in my opinion it’s really interesting. Sometimes, blogging books bombard readers with info while displaying confusing graphic figures. Not so with this one. It is incredibly easy to follow this teaching tool.
Overall, Plumley’s work is a great resource; especially for beginning bloggers. Also, this book comes with a great supplemental DVD, which enhances many of the advanced printed lessons and proves very helpful when configuring files and customizing.
Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods
Twitter may be the most effective social media tool for promoting grassroots causes. Irrespective of whether one’s initiative qualifies as political, business, or artistic; this micro blogging platform integrates extremely well with blogging and other social media sites. In fact, Twitter continues to prove effective to the point where major corporations like Dell, Comcast, Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines, Proctor & Gamble, Virgin America, U-Haul, Geek Squad, Best Buy, Pepsi, Ford, Zappos, H&R Block, Rubbermaid, Molson, Tyson Foods, etc… all utilize Twitter in various ways. Shel Israel explains how these companies connect, promote, and run damage control in a 32 million member global community known as “Twitterville.”
To my surprise, after presenting the ways many businesses use Twitter to connect directly with customers (especially in handling customer service)Twittervilleopened my eyes to “a large cult of generosity.” The book also considers our drastic societal change from the invention of the telephone to the phenomenon known as micro blogging.
I found reading Twitterville to be a refreshing experience because Shel Israel devotes the end of the book to how Twitter can be used to help people in need, as well as to promote world peace. The concluding messages in Twitterville place hope in an international community building ties through social media and technologically enhanced citizen communication.
Seldom do books inspire me to want to contribute to this world in whatever way I can. That being said, I never expected Shel Israel’s Twitterville to motivate me to search some of the sources he mentions. In particular, I was interested in blog widgets that allow bloggers to accept donations on behalf of a charity in a transparent manner. So if you’re a blogger and would like to collect for a worthy charity, check out the ChipIn site. You can customize blog widgets there (available for Facebook as well).
My recommendation = Twitterville is an insightful book—definitely worth reading
_________________________________________________________ Shel Israel is also the author of How Businesses can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods [Portfolio, Sept. 2009]; co-author, of Naked Conversations–how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers [Wiley, 2006], and The Conversational Corporation, a Dow Jones eBook [May 2009]. He’s contributed editorially to BusinessWeek and FastCompanyTV.
Anything in the bookstore with WordPress in the title prompts me to stop and take a second look; which is what happened yesterday. Web Designer magazine has a new “Wordpress Wizard” issue featuring an interview with WP co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The interview offers plenty of insight into the future of online publishing, in addition to discussing Mullenweg’s open source commitment and enthusiasm for listening to the blogging community.
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