Click here to download it now.

1. Double click on your FileZilla icon  from your desktop. Once you have done so, you should see the following:
   
2. Complete the following boxes (below the header at the top of the screen):Address - The URL of your blog/website (don’t include http:// at the beginning)
   User - your ftp username
   Password - your ftp password
   Port - Leave Blank or enter 21 (it should by default enter this automatically)
3. Click Quickconnect! You are now connected to your ftp account.
   
4. Double click on the WWW directory folder located on the right hand side so that the directory is opened. If you have a registered domain on your account then the “index.html” file should be within your “www/yourdomain.com/” directory.  “index.html” will be the main page of your site.
   If you use Wordpress and have a registered domain on your account then the Wordpress files can be accessed using the following path /www/wp-content/themes/ and select your theme folder. You will find all the php, css and image files for your Wordpress site in there. For more help you can watch a demo “how to upload Wordpress plugins and templates with Filezilla“.
5. From the left hand side of the FileZilla program, you will need to search for your files on your computer in which you would like to upload to your site under “Local Site“.
6. Highlight all of the files you wish to upload and then DRAG them over to an open area on the right hand side of the FileZilla program so that you will upload the files into an area inside your WWW directory.  PLEASE NOTE: If you are using Wordpress then you will need to upload these files into www/wp-content/themes/your theme folder.
7. Your files will upload instantly onto your site. A message will appear at the top above the local site to let you know if the upload was successful.
8. That’s all there is to it - EASY!If you have any questions about FileZilla or need further help, please leave a comment at the end of this post and I will respond.

Filezilla: Watch a demo to help you download, install and configure Filezilla

For more help or information please leave comment.

You can download a Wordpress plugin that will automatically generate and publish Technorati Tags and HTML Meta Keywords based on the full content of your post.
Once generated, tags can be manually edited to ensure the tags are relevant to the content. Manually editing your tags is recommended because if you have written a post about Ipods and have not mentioned a term, such as “Apple” then it will not appear as a tag, so there’s an audience group that you’re possibly missing.
The plugin is called AutoMeta and it can be downloaded here

You will see a link included to each theme’s home page as well as a download link.

The screen shots you see have been taken from the screen grabs of blogs running the specific theme.

Feel free to leave comments and recommendation of any of these themes or any that you use that you would like to see added to the list.

1. Silver Lexus | Download






2. Vistererd Little | Download



3. WP-Andreas | Download



4. Cordobo Green Park | Download



5. Mandigo | Download



6. Cutline 3-Column Split | Download



7. Tiga | Download



8. Andreas04 | Download



9. Light | Download



10. DFire | Download



11. Orange Crush | Download



12. Black Minimailsm | Download



13. Glued Ideas Subtle | Download



14. Waterlily | Download



15. Wucoco Three Column | Download



16. Rounded V2 Blue Edition | Download



17. 1024PX | Download



18. FallSeason | Download



19. Big Blue | Download



20. Talian | Download



21. Pop Blue | Download



22. Freshy | Download

• Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
• We’re using the new jQuery whis is “800% faster.”
• Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system which, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
• The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
• Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
• The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
• Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post.

• Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
• Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
• We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location.
• Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
• There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

This is the advice given to you if you want to play it safe and have a peace of mind all the time. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my blog and all the content inside it…all those posts I’ve spent years writing, all those links, images etc. So how do I avoid all that? It’s easy - you backup it up and doing a backup of your entire Wordpress blog literally takes minutes trust me.

If your reading this article and so far thinking “what the hell, why should I do a backup when I pay good money for hosting, it’s them that should do a backup not me” or worse, “I don’t have to worry, my hosting provider creates backups every day”. These are a few common excuses I’ve heard of many times.

Well let me tell you what can happen if you think the same way others think by telling you my story. About 9 months ago I was hosting with a company called Bliksem. I’d been with Bliksem for a couple of years and had no problems with them at all until one fine day that all changed. I found all my sites were down as was bliksem’s support site. I was unable to contact them to find out what happened. I started visiting forums and found out I was not the only one.  It seemed they have gone out of business which was not good news for me because my backups were a month old and a few new sites I had started were not backed up at all. I was very upset but more so angry with myself for not sparing myself a couple of minutes to do a simple backup.
Remember the saying, “you only realise what you have until it’s gone”. So take my advice and backup your blog NOW if you haven’t done so already.
Spending a few minutes to create an easy, convenient backup of your Wordpress blog will allow you to spend even more time being creative and productive with your website.

How often should you backup?

I usually backup twice a week but it really depends on how often you update your blog. I update mine everyday and I spend a lot of time writing most of my articles so ideally, I want to backup almost straight after I publish to be on the safe side.

How many backups should I keep?

Well this question got me thinking because what I use to do is create a full backup and then just replace it every time with a new one. The reason I did this was the obvious really, plus I didn’t want too many backups on the server cause that just used up my disk space even though I save the backup to my hard drive also. But then I started to think…what if that backup file is corrupted or deleted? Then what would I do? So now I keep at least two backups on my hard drive, one on a CD and just the one on the server. If you want to you can save them to floppy disk, CD or even email it to yourself.

Can backups be automated?

Yes, although this can be a complicated process it can be done on one of two ways:

• Cron Job Backups - nightly SQL backup which can be emailed to you
• Skippy’s Wordpress Database Backup Plugin (Email, Save to Server, and Auto-Scheduling) (version for Wordpress 2.1.x)

Backing Up Your Wordpress Site

It’s important to understand how your Wordpress blog is made up so we understand the backup process. There are two parts to backing up your Wordpress site: Database and Files. Your files consist of any plugins you have installed, your Wordpress theme, images, php files and any other code files.
You also need to backup your Wordpress database. The database are things like your posts/pages that contain all your content.

If your Wordpress site is hosted by someone then you should check with your hosting company if they provide backups. Some companies are not responsible for doing backups and this will be stated in their Terms of Conditions (TOS) when you sign up. It’s usually the case with small hosts.
With other companies they will backup the entire server, including your database and files. As mentioned at the start you should always take precaution because you just never know what might happen. That’s why you need to learn how to backup your own Wordpress site. Here are ways how:

1. Website Hosting Provider Backup

   Most website hosting providers will offer a full backup of your site. Check with your host to find out if they do provide this and how often they backup. But MOST IMPORTANT, ask them how you can do the backup yourself. I use Oxynic.com and they provide a full backup facility where not only they do the backups but you can as well. It’s very easy to do and I can carry out a full backup from my control panel. I can save a backup to my server as well as my hard drive. It takes literally minutes to do. When you log into your Cpanel you will see the Backup option under files. Click the Backup icon. This will take you to the next page and you need to click “Download or Generate a Full Backup“. (Full backups can only be used for moving your account to another server or keeping a local copy of your account) On the next page, click the”Generate Backup” button. A message will appear to say the backup is in progress. This will backup your Wordpress site on your server. After a minute Click the “Go Back” link once. You will now be able to see the backups available for download. (tar.gz) Right-Click on todays backup and select “Save Target As…” A dialogue box will open and you need to choose a location on the hard drive to save your backup to. That’s it your done! 

2. Wordpress Database Backup Plugin

   This one is also pre-installed by default and is recommended as part of the routine for upgrading Wordpress. Every time you increment your install, you should do a backup with this plugin.

3. Copy Your Files to Your Computer

   You can use any Ftp program like FileZilla (recommended), WSFtp, SmartFtp to copy your files to a folder on your computer.
   Remember to keep at least three backups on the computer incase one is corrupted or deleted. It would also be worth saving each one in a different place incase the folder is corrupted or deleted like a CD, floppy drive, different hard drives, etc.

You are welcome to leave comments of ask a question if you need more help or information.
 

To see a demo you can take a look at my sidebar and see the way I  have added RSS icons to each of my categories. Just scroll down the page and you will see the categories on the rightside of the page. If you want the same thing then follow these easy steps:

1. Login to your Wordpress administration panel
2. Select Presentation ->Theme Editor from the navigation menu
3. On the Theme Editor page, you will see a list of “theme files” to the right of the page. Select the “sidebar template” (sidebar.php).
4. Find the code thats looks similiar to this
   <?php wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=1′); ?>
   Overwrite this line of code with the following
   <?php wp_list_cats(’orderby=id&show_count=1&hierarchical=1&feed_image=/images/rss.gif’); ?>
5. Save

Insert the RSS Image

1. Grab an RSS image from the internet and resize to 10 pixels (height and width)
2. Upload the RSS image to you image folder, i.e. www.domain.com/images/

That’s it your done!

1. Comment Relish: An excellent plugin that is certainly part of my “must use” folder when setting up new blogs.
2. Social Bookmarks: I use Sociable. It automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. When ever you or someone bookmarks your posts via the links it will auto fill the URL and title therefore all you have to do is click “submit”
3. Meta Tags: The plugin name is Autometa. It will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. This is an SEO essential plugin you must install and use. It’s very easy to use; the creation process involves generating a list of all the important words in the article, by stripping out punctuation and then removing common words like the, and, then, a etc. Of course you can edit this and add your own which is what I do every time.
4. Google Adsense: has become the most popular Internet contextual money-making program and integrating Google Adsense into your Wordpress template has become so easy with the many plugins available. The most popular is Adsense Deluxe. It offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense to your Wordpress posts. You can easily enable, disable and change your Adsense through the Wordpress control panel.  Click here for a list of the 10 best Adsense related plugins
5. Akismet: Do you get lots of SPAM messages every day in the comments column of your blog? If you do then did you know you can block such spam messages? All you need to do is install Akismet - a anti-spam plugin. It will filter your spam separately so you can delete them from one location within the Wordpress admin panel with a single click. I use Akismet and it works great. Since installing it, it has caught 173 spam comments for me.
6. Send to a Friend: I use WP-EMail that allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. A very good plugin that will help to increase the number of visits to your site. 
7. Daily Top 10 Posts: This fantastic plugin tracks the number of pageviews per blog post for TODAY and you can display the results anywhere you want, i.e. sidebar, header, footer, etc. You can see a demo of this on this site just below the header. It tells me and other readers what the most popular posts are for today and how many views those posts get. With the same plugin I can also show the most popular posts overall.
8. Ultimate Tag Warrior: A tagging plugin that you will often see being used on more and more sites. To put it simple it’s basically a list of keywords visible on the sidebar in my case called a “Tag Cloud”. The bigger the font size of that keyword the more popular it is. It’s very easy to use and you can add the tags through the Write post page in Wordpress in a tag box.
9. Sitemap Generator Plugin: I use DDSiteMapGen, an excellent plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap for your site and it’s not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which can easily be customised from the options page in the Wordpress admin panel. For a demo click here