I have been blogging here for the past 5 months , however even then i am hardly what you can call a prolific blogger . Wordpress is a terrific blogging platform , and that is nothing new. But every day i get new examples or rather proof of that . In the past 1-2 weeks i have noticed how different people have been utilizing it to its ultimate limit – be it for personal pleasure or be it for earning money , below are some examples .

Example # 1. My friend Abhishek , who claims bloging has changed his life so much that he is now more of a blogger than a businessman . ( Inside scoop – he runs a web company with offices around the globe)

Example # 2. Some people are so obsessed with wordpress that they celebrated 15th August with the artwork mentioned here.

Example # 3. Wordpress as a free software, in the past few years has been playing a huge role in seo / search engine optimization for several sites and internet marketers. To stay in the radar for a large mass of wordpress users , several people have taken the oppurtunity to develop free plugins in order to further aid the increase in popularity of your wordpress site. create a realy useful wordpress plugin and keep giving optional support and you have got more traffic than you ever could amass using adsense or any other form of commercial advertisement.

Example # 4. What started as a similar ideology ala designing artisitic wordpress themes for free , has however now become somewhat distorted . People still continue making sponsored wordpress themes , which has now been blocked for submission on wordpress.org themes collection. This has not stopped people from carrying on the business , rather gearing up to make it into an art by itself .

Example # 5. But uptill now , all the examples were about invidual efforts on earning money or fanaticism or love for Wordpress blogging. But the probably the people who are in love with wordpress the most are the illustrious blog network owners and PaidtoBlog authors . It is not a big secret that blogs are a great way to get yourself or your product or service popularized .
Initially it started with true bloggers mentioning some service they purchased or some movie they saw or some web host they liked . Other visitors to that blog would comment asking more clarifications why they liked it or why they disliked it . This created a buzz , and if that blog had a good technorati rating or someone bookmarked that blog post , that would lead to a good traffic channel . Several businessmen and website owners found this to be a great way to get marketted and they decided to lure some bloggers to pay to write about their business or give them a link. There’s a bengali saying about tigers and taste of blood , i just cant recall … but the person who got $15 USD from some person he never knew for doing what he would have done as it is , would jump at the oppurtunity and if he is more than just a writer , he would take a cheap hosting, download 30 different free themes, utilise some even greater wordpress plugin to post simaltaneously on multiple blogs and create options for webmasters looking for getting 1000 backlinks, and a post on a page with google PR.
Google has recently come out with its paid link reporting tool , which might be the death of these paid blogging site for all we know , but at least untill that gets confirmed over the time , webmasters with blog networks ( often with multiple authors spinning diverse content with extra payment ) , will make some good money , and i can tell you this much that its nothing near to a measly 15 USD .

Wordpress themes and templates has always been a target . Till now , was mostly busy with Invisionboard and vBulletin skins and templates , and occassionally some other scripts… like phpld and 4images. When i decide to get on any skinning or templating, I always like to read out the official forums of the software , as they contain a huge resource , tips and FAQ’s . But with wordpress, you dont need to go to its support forum , but rather there is a huge repository of articles , all stored in its Wiki , called Codex. However , when checked codex today, it seemed to me some of the design and layout pages on the wiki is little out of date . Nevertheless, it is definitely the best place to start.

Unlike many other softwares or scripts I have worked on before, I really look forward to making wordpress themes . Unlike commercial softwares,  wordpress has a even larger userbase and hence a good market too . vBulletin is a largely popular script , and there are always forums popping up here and there every day . But forums are made by forum admins and the requirements for a forum theme will be probably once every 6 months or 1 year for say 500 users in a forum . But , almost 500 of those individual forum members can have a Blog and thats counting it less .  I can keep talking about how great Wordpress is and why I believe 425 of those  500 members will decide to have a hosted Wordpress instead of some blog host .  But that is not the main reason i am happy too … the main reason is that a Blog is totally a mood oriented site , I have seen Blog owners wanting to have a new look for their blog or at least order or search for various Blog headers many times a year .

Social Bookmarking is nothing new and this post is going to be just another one amongst hundreds . For the past 2 days I myself have been spending some time tinkering with the idea of adding social bookmarking links and icons to these blog. Now adding / installing social bookmarking links is only the easy part . getting people / visitors to use it would be the difficult part , of course. They have got to find the post useful and worth bookmarking , for that.

How to do that ? Go here and download this nifty plugin by the great Alex King There are other similar plugins which adds the icons in the post , which i feel looks a little messy , where as this plugin only shows a small icon , clicking which brings up a popup where the links to other bookmarking sites comes out. However , the plugin comes default with only few sites . But it can easily be increased by little change in configuration , and doing so , will allow you to add links of unlimited other simmilar bookmarking sites as listed in this nice blog.

On another note, in the past 2 days I have also been somewhat active again on DP , where there are about hundreds of webmasters who are buying, renting , exchanging stumbles, diggs, from each other . I wonder how that is going to work … will that result into ban for the sites ? for the exchangers ? or will it actually help increasing such exchanged websites popularity ?

( Look for this option just below this and every post )