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Max Rebo Band Website Live

The featured Blog this week is Max Rebo Band Website, which is a WordPress site using the default Twenty Eleven 1.2 theme. Kudos to Rich Pegler, the band’s drummer and webmaster, who has set this great site up from scratch. This just shows you the flexibility of WordPress out of the box, and the Max Rebo Website is a good place to see what is possible.

Max Rebo are a great four piece band, based in the area around Bristol and Weston-super-Mare, who are described as the best covers band this side of the galaxy. You may have guessed from the band name, and other Star Wars references that there is a theme to the website. May the Force be with you; this is the band you are looking for! Along with the usual band Biog, Events Discussion Board and Shop, there is a Media section where you can hear and download some of the original tracks penned by Max Rebo, as well as some of their great covers.

Once you have visited the site, you may be wondering how Rich has managed to achieve all the features, just using standard WordPress plugins. Along with Mingle Forum, ShareThis, Status Press Widget, Widget Twitter VJCK, WPaudio and WP Photo Album Plus the site uses:

  • Events Manager, which is an Event registration and booking management plugin for WordPress. Allows recurring events and shows locations, with links to google maps.
  • Flash MP3 Player JW2.3, a user friendly MP3 Player widget which you can add to your sidebar. You edit the playlist through the intuitive options page.
  • GRAND Flash Album Gallery provides a comprehensive interface for managing photos and images through a set of admin pages,
    with a very professional feel.

A great band from the southwest, with an interesting WordPress implementation. Click here to visit the Max Rebo Band Website

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The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age Featured Blog

The featured Blog this week is The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, which is a WordPress Blog hosted at WordPress.com. It uses the Freshy theme by Jide and may be described as a comparative newcomer in the blogosphere, with its first post date-stamped on 28th June 2010.

The current headline post dated 8th September 2010 is a leader for a report entitled Better for Less: How to make Government IT deliver saving. This critical report by Liam Maxwell investigates the quagmire of government IT. In fact you might say that he has slammed the whole way that Government IT procurement is handled. The report is linked from the site, and should be read by anyone in government IT with responsibility for procurement.

The main reasons for singling out this site as a featured blog, is more about what it represents rather than it’s august history. This is a Think Tank, close to government which is criticizing the status quo. We consider that at least five of the seven examples of potential saving have merit, and the others may be examples where savings could be made without massive changes to the infrastructure

  • A test environment for development companies with easy access to rack-space
  • Open Source on the desktop through the use of Open Document Format
  • New models sought for software framework (may we suggest Apache, My SQL, PHP for a start)
  • Commoditization of Email and office productivity
  • Common Security Framework
  • Migrating Schools to Free email services
  • Prizes for IT innovation in education

Plaudits to The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age for hosting this message on WordPress.com and using the most popular blogging platform on the planet – WordPress!

Click here to visit The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age

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Katie Freiling featured WordPress blog

The featured WordPress blog this week is the personal, coaching and marketing site of Katie Freiling, a social media, blogging, and personal development coach in the online home business industry. This one takes the headline position because of its balance between the personal blog style, and the content and panache of a marketing guru. It uses the Fresh News theme by WooThemes from WooThemes

The site is a must see for anybody who is considering setting up a blog for marketing purposes, including nonprofit organizations, associations or coalitions, or even just to promote a worthy cause. It contains tips on Video marketing, getting top rankings in search engines, list building and numerous desirable achievements. The included YouTube videos are textbook examples of the way to build your brand online, in small chunks.

Among her plugins, Katie is using the WP-FacebookConnect, WP-Polls and the ubiquitous Contact Form 7. WP-FacebookConnect adds Facebook functionality to WordPress using the Facebook Connect APIs. It provides single sign-on, avatars, and News Feed publication of comments. WP-Polls adds an AJAX based poll system to your WordPress blog so that you can easily include a poll into a page or post.

You can find the plugins to add to your own WordPress site by following the links below:

Click here to visit Katie Freiling’s blog

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Featured WordPress blog is Twingly

The featured WordPress blog this week is Twingly Blog, and more specificly a post by Martin Weiger called Europe’s 50 most popular startups according to the blogosphere.. Using data from their Twingly Blog Search they rank blogs in the global blogosphere from May 1 to July 31. This gives you a useful list of web and tech startups to check out for inspiration.

The blog has posts going back to September 2006, and provides lots of interesting comment and links to resources. It also contains the observation that A blog is a timeline; The fact that every blog is an ordered record of thoughts and opinions makes the aggregated data of many blogs very valuable.

This is a useful tip to remember when you are structuring your own WordPress posts, as you should consider that you are also writing for history, as well as promoting your latest product or venting your spleen. Surf back through the Twingly timeline and see how the writing style has progressed, and the rated Social Media sites and tools have emerged. Consider the way your own posts might be viewed in three months, or after a year, or in five year’s time.

The Twingly Blog uses the Neutra Theme, by Artmov which is a simple and elegant free theme. The site is hosted at WordPress.com.

Resources to check out:

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The Spending Challenge Featured Blog

The featured WordPress blog this week is actually a UK government site called The Spending Challenge.

It uses a Theme in a directory called Coalitiondocdg, which may be a custom solution, with Contact Form 7 plugin by Takayuki Miyoshi to capture your feedback. It also uses Recent Posts with Excerpts plugin by Stephanie Leary, which lists your most recent posts with excerpts, optionally limited to a category.

According to the home page, The Spending Challenge is your chance to shape the way the UK government works, and help us get more for less as we try to bring down the deficit. It seems to be open initially to people who work in the public sector, but after 8th July the process will be opened up to the wider public. It is easy to make a suggestion via the site, and the email address is optional, so there is a level of anonymity.

For what it is worth, my suggestion was to allow (or even ecourage) organisations to save money by using open source web applications like Apache, MySQL and WordPress on the national infrastructure to provide a low-cost generic platform for non-critical applications.

To visit the site and see an example of WordPress in action in government click here to visit The Spending Challenge.

If you are interested in adding either of the plugins to your WordPress site, see the links below:

You can download the plugins from the links above, or alternatively, if you are in the Install Plugins section of your site Dashboard, search for Recent Posts with Excerpts or Contact Form 7, and the when you have found the right one, click on Install Now.

If you are interested in those plugins, you may also be interested in the Contact Form 7 Widget by Stephanie Wells which allows you to use Contact Form 7 Forms in your sidebars.

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Maximizing WordPress Through Social Networking

Our featured blog this week is the WordPress hosted Smoke-Free Texas if for no other reason that it has a good message!

However, check out the sensible inclusion of Latest Flickr photos, Twitter feed and Smoke-Free Texas on Facebook links, maximizing their targeted inbound traffic potential. There are useful WordPress plug-ins for these Social Networking sites available from WordPress.Org Social Network

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Australian WordPress Blogger Featured

The featured blog this week is littlelioness.net, a personal blog by Fiona, a 27 year old Australian woman currently residing in Canberra. The littlelioness.net domain was registered on 11 September 2002, and is powered by WordPress, and there are archives which go back to November 2007, so Fiona has been blogging a comparatively long time. The theme is WhitePlus, which is available from the WordPress.org Free Themes Directory WhitePlus

The site has some great food pics on the pages which makes them attractive and interesting. Newbie bloggers should take note, and make sure to include photos in your posts to hold your readers’ attention.

As a Speech Pathologist, and an Atheist who sometimes works in Catholic schools, Fiona has some interesting personal challenges, and a chatty style when talking about them. For a view on her world, click here to visit littlelioness.net

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Featured WordPress Blog – Chas Harris Footloose

Our featured blog this week is a hosted at WordPress.com, and it is by Charles Harris of Footloose Films. It is a good example of why blogging using WordPress is such a liberating outlet and is part of what make the Internet great. Check out “Best TV drama, my arse” for a sample of Charles’ forthright opinions.

Charles Harris is an experienced award-winning writer-director for cinema and TV. He sold his first script for production in Hollywood and has since worked with top names in the industry from James Stewart to Spike Milligan. As script consultant, he has helped professional writers from Britain, Europe and USA, sat on BAFTA awards juries and lectured on MA courses at London University and London Film School. He is also a qualified NLP trainer and Advanced Presenter.

The Chas Harris Footloose site carries information on Writing and Directing, with a sideline of NLP and Martial Arts! It is small but growing steadily, so we will keep a watching brief on this site. Charles runs workshops on writing Treatments, Screenwriting, and Pitching, which is grabbing the attention of entertainment industry professionals in just a few words. Everybody can use some tips on that!

The WordPress theme used on the Chas Harris Footloose site is Andreas04 by Andreas Viklund. Andreas is responsible for a number of themes, which we have used on our many hosted WordPress blogs.

Follow the links below for more information

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Advice at the Intersection of Work and Life

Featured WordPress blog: Brazen Careerist – Advice at the intersection of Work and Life

This week we are visiting a blog which is a wonderful place to draw inspiration if you are a writer or blogger, and highly entertaining for everyone, even if they are neither. It is titled Brazen Careerist, by Penelope Trunk, with the subtitle Advice at the intersection of Work and Life. It contains such gems as “if you want to be an idea person, you should sit down and write an idea first thing in the morning”.

Penelope Trunk is the founder of 3 internet companies, most recently Brazen Careerist, a social network to help young people manage their careers. As an entrepreneur she got a column in a national magazine and started giving advice in places like Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Times. Her career advice now appears in more than 200 newspapers.

As she points out in Penelope’s Guide to Blogging, a blog is a great way to figure out what you want to do with yourself because writing regularly is a path to self-discovery. For that blinding insight alone she deserves a visit, but believe me, the rest of the site is filled with the same sort of wisdom which bloggers, job seekers, and Internet savvy in general should be immersed in every day.

Another point she has made in her blog is that personal responsibility is the most important trait of a successful career. This is one right out of our business coaching manual and a sentiment we have been able to identify with in other ventures such as life coaching and presentation skills training.

Would be bloggers would befit from reading Penelope’s post entitled What makes a blog successful? This contains some interesting views about why you should blog; we might even make it required reading on our Getting Started With WordPress training!

To read more from this entertaining blogger, click here to visit Brazen Careerist