To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress plug-ins” in Google and you’ll find more than enough results to choose from. If you don’t feel like having to click through pages and pages of sites that actually offer just a handful of plug-ins but a whole lot of ads go directly to the official Wordpress plug-ins page. There are lots and lots of plug-ins to choose from there.

Some plug-ins that i recommend for you to install on your blog include:

All-in-one SEO Pack – Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines; This makes life a lot easier! Automatic generation of meta tags, etc.

SEO Slugs – Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimisation.

Akismet – Helps battle comment spam. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

SixApart has just announced the release of MovableType 4 Beta. Many have known MT as the definitive blogging software that has forever changed the way people blog.

Beyond WordPress

Those who are well-versed with the history of blogging will know that the boom did not start with WordPress. The first wave came with MovableType. Few blog software were as easy to customize, and this attracted a large following.

Movable Type was once the darling of the blogosphere, especially from its original launch in 2001 to about 2004 (when licensing issues upset many bloggers). Since 2004/05, many bloggers have migrated to the open source Wordpress – and perhaps of more concern, a lot of third party developers transferred their efforts from MT to Wordpress

Source: Read/Write Web

What’s New With MT?

The latest version of MovableType will include a completely revamped user interface, improved scalability, and over 50 new features like tagging, widgets, as well as static pages and media management. It looks like SixApart wants its blog software to provide more uses than straight-up blogging, which WordPress has managed to do.

MT Goes Open Source

Perhaps the most important part of SixApart’s announcement is that an open source version of MovableType will be released at MovableType.org (under the GPL).

This is big. Being open source is one WordPress’ greatest assets and is one of the biggest reasons it gained the following that outshines MT today.

Also, most professional blogs out there—whether under a blog network or not—have taken advantage of the cost-effectiveness of WordPress. Its open source license had a lot to do with that.

MT Goes Social

MovableType serves a well-defined purpose for a well-defined market: ultra-flexible yet no-frills blogging for the expert blogger. Yet SixApart’s more social blog services, LiveJournal and Vox, provide proof that adding social (community- and relationship-oriented) features opens up new possibilities in the blogging context, aside from making it a lot more interesting and “human”. MovableType 4 will soon join this social shift:

MT4 has been re-designed and re-architected as a platform to address their needs while providing a basis to build social networking features that re-define the scope of blogging.

Source: SixApart Press Release

I’m personally curious how well these features will be put to use by the MT users/audience.

More to Come

SixApart says this announcement is just the first of several that will cover new products and services for for MT4. Shall I stay tuned? Definitely. I’m genuinely interested in how MovableType’s open source version will compete with WordPress’ own and how new developments in blog software will reshape this industry once more. Never a dull moment in blogging, it seems!

You can download the beta version of MT4 at MovableType.org.

1. Think of keywords for your blog. Keywords are important because we want our blog to be easily remembered by potential visitors. It is also great for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Figure out what’s apt for the blog you want to make. For instance, if you are going to blog about cars and you are located in Detroit, you can use ‘cars’ and ‘detroit’ in your keywords. You can get help from Yahoo’s overture tool for suggested keywords. For this example, let’s use ‘carsdetroit’.

2. Search for a domain name. You can use services like Godaddy for this. Type-in “carsdetroit” in the search domain box. If it is available, buy it. You can see that CarsDetroit.net is available in the image below. Buy your domain name with your trusty credit card. Take note, CarsDetroit.info is worth only $0.99! Get it!

3. Set up a blogger account. If you have a Google account, you can pretty much login with that and setting it up. Go to the publishing – settings page and edit the custom domain name field. Input your domain name (in our example, we should put carsdetroit.info) in this field. You can see the full instructions on blogger.

4. Login in to GoDaddy.com and set up your domain name to connect to the blogger website.

Congratulations! You now have a blog set up for less than a dollar.

Among all the content providers available in the internet, Youtube is clearly tops. Aside from being the repository of third-party videos, the site can also serve as a host for a user’s personal videos. These could in turn be used for a user’s personal blog or website. Though Youtube already gives out a pre-fabricated code for embedding the file, you may only use the code while on the “code editor” and once you revert to the “visual editor” the code will be distorted and unreadable. Not only will the code change, it will also cause the video to not appear.

Try it for yourselves. It’s a fair assumption that most Wordpress bloggers use the visual editor and since it is the “first” view that appears when trying to edit and entry, the code would’ve been altered by the mere act of clicking the edit button. One way to keep this from happening is disabling the visual editor under “Profile”.

If you’re unwilling to sacrifice the visual editor for the well-being of your Youtube codes, you may download Youtube Brackets. This plugin makes embedding Youtube videos easier by limiting the necessary coding to:

[youtube=videourl]

Just like that, your video will be embedded without the hassles of Wordpress altering the code the next time you edit it. If you’re fine with hard coding Youtube videos into your blogs the hard[er] way, be my guest. But if you’re one of those who would rather take the easy route in things like embedding videos, this plugin is exactly the one you need.