I switched to Google chrome as my default browser some time back as it tends to react fast when it comes to my firefox setup loaded with so many plugins. I came across this great Chrome extension – Google Mail checker which keeps me notified of unread email Gmail messages. Moreover, it works for Google Apps users too.

Here is a screenshot of my Chrome :

Just sign in your Gmail as you normally do and it will start showing you the number of unread emails count.

To use it for Google Apps, right click on the icon, select option and then enter the path to your domain name.

It also animates when the count changes. Pretty simple & useful extension in my opinion.

I would like it to provide sound notifications too but sadly it is not there. May be it will annoy some users and defeat the whole purpose of concentrating more on work. We can have an option to enable notifications which can be disabled by default. What do you think?

If you wish you can view other Official extensions for Google products. They are useful but I don’t use them all day long. May be you do.

• Enable Dual or Triple View both horizontally or vertically in Google Chrome
• Setup Google Apps for managing domain emails
• Dual Window hack in Google Chrome [Javascript Plugin]
• Display posts from another WordPress installation
• Examine HTML headers in Firefox and Google Chrome

PDFMYURL.COM is a service which just gives you the pdf file to download without any hassles of waiting or sending you the links to your email address. Just type in the URL and the pdf file will start downloading the next moment. I would surely recommend it to anybody who wants to save a pdf version of web pages.

Embed Download as PDF Link in WordPress blog

You can easily embed the option of downloading the posts as pdf links in your WordPress theme. Just place the following PHP code inside the WordPress loop in your theme file where you want the link to appear.

<a href="http://pdfmyurl.com?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Download as PDF</a>

Place it inside the WordPress loop and you will get the functionality to download posts as pdf without any plugin or additional load on your server.

Above is a screenshot of how it looks on my blog.

If you need any kind of help, then feel free to leave a comment & I will help you out.

• Show RSS feeds inside WordPress pages through PHP
• How to customize your WordPress Blog’s 404 page
• Add blog feed to Facebook notes
• How to Create a PayPal Invoice
• Deal with Blog Scrappers getting indexed quicker than the original site

Add Blog feeds

• Go to your profile page on Facebook
• Under the Share tab, Click on Options.
• Now click on Settings.
• Now look for Blog/RSS option to add your blog feed.
• Add the feed url here and click on Import.
• From now on all your blog posts will appear as Notes under your profile.

Now your blog posts will have a better chance of getting exposure. Remember don’t let your content go down deep in the archives, get it out, spread the word. Have your say in the comments.

• Refresh Facebook Notes Feeds if they have stopped updating
• PNotes – Easy way of organizing notes
• Portable Feed Reader – Carry your feeds with you
• Keep your online world close to Facebook
• Post Twitter updates on Facebook automatically

<div id="bbpress_forumlist">
<table id="forumlist">
	<thead>
		<tr>
		<th>Topics</th>
		<th>Author</th>
		<th>Last Reply by</th>
		</tr>
	</thead>
	<tbody>
	<?php
	$forum_id = 7;
	$limit = 5;
	global $wpdb;
	$query = "SELECT topic_title,topic_poster_name,topic_last_poster_name FROM life_topics WHERE forum_id = ".$forum_id." LIMIT ".$limit;
	$topicslist = $wpdb->get_results($query,"ARRAY_N");

	if(!$topicslist)
		echo "err";
	else
	{
		foreach( $topicslist as $topicslist )
		{
			echo '<tr>';
			echo '<td>'.$topicslist[0].'</td>';
			echo '<td>'.$topicslist[1].'</td>';
			echo '<td>'.$topicslist[2].'</td>';
			echo '</tr>';
		}
	}
	?>
	</tbody>
</table>
</div>

This is a very basic demonstration of fetching the data in a simple table. You need to change the forum_id to the id of your forums (Look into your database via phpMyAdmin) on line 12, change the no of topics to display on line 13 and change the bbPress table prefix in query on line 15.

You can also make your titles hyperlinked with the topic slug by fetching topic_slug from the database and generating the URL as per your permalinks setup. Doing this goes beyond the scope of this simple tutorial. You can also fetch topic_time to display the time in another column of the table. Just add CSS classes to style the table via CSS.

Have anything to ask or more to implement. Feel free to ask in the comments! Make sure you check out other tutorials to show bbPress content inside WordPress & the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• Show bbPress forum list with posts & topics count in WordPress
• Integrate bbpress forum with your wordpress setup
• Show post count and topics started in bbPress
• How to show Random Items out of a list
• Show bbPress content inside WordPress

Before you can play around with bbPress information, you need to integrate WordPress with bbPress. After integration you can place this code anywhere in your template and it will fetch information from bbPress tables.

<div id="bbpress_forumlist">
	<table>
		<thead>
			<tr>
				<th>Forums</th>
				<th>Topics</th>
				<th>Posts</th>
			</tr>
		</thead>
		<tbody>
		<?php
		global $wpdb;
		$forumslist = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT forum_name, topics, posts from bb_forums","ARRAY_N");
		if ($forumslist)
		{
			foreach ($forumslist as $row)
			{
				echo '<tr>';
				echo '<td>'.$row[0].'</td>';
				echo '<td>'.$row[1].'</td>';
				echo '<td>'.$row[1].'</td>';
				echo '</tr>';
			}
		}
		else
			echo 'Error fetching data';
		?>
		</tbody>
	</table>
</div>

You can easily style the table via CSS. Just add some classes and you can give it the look you want. If you have a different bbPress table prefix, make sure you change the table name in the SQL query (13^th line). There is more that you can do with this actually. Fetch more things like forum description, forum slug or make the forum name clickable to the forum page of bbPress. Take a quick peek at NAP’s homepage and you will get an idea.

Have anything to ask or more to implement. Feel free to ask in the comments! Make sure you check out other tutorials to show bbPress content inside WordPress & the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• List of topics of a particular bbPress forum
• Show post count and topics started in bbPress
• Show bbPress content inside WordPress
• Integrate bbpress forum with your wordpress setup
• How to show Random Items out of a list

A good approach would be to mimic the functionality offered by one into another. First of all I would recommend integrating WordPress with bbPress so that they share the same database and then we can use SQL queries to fetch data from the database. The idea is to get the data by our queries and then we can manipulate as per our needs and mimic the functionality of the needed function.

Without deep integration, we can easily display the list of forums with their topics and posts count. We can display recent topics or recent replies to topics. In fact we can do anything we want. We just need to mimic that function and if any help is needed in mimicking that functionality we can always take a look at the source code of the other script.

Here is the list of tutorials which shows bbPress content inside WordPress :

• List of forums with topic & post count
• Topics started with post author, last reply poster & freshness of a forum

Its impossible to cover some examples here as the post will become too long to read. Hence I will demonstrate the usage in separate queries.

Have any questions? Feel free to ask via comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• Show RSS feeds inside WordPress pages through PHP
• Show content on basis of logged in status of users in bbPress
• Show bbPress forum list with posts & topics count in WordPress
• Show custom excerpts of the post in WordPress
• Show post count and topics started in bbPress

You might say that php random function is the answer to the problem but I have a few things to talk about.

Using PHP Random function to show 1 random item

If you don’t know how to use php random function to show different images every time with a link then here is how it is done. We will deal with the limitations as we proceed.

We have a list of links in an array $link and the images are renamed with a constant suffixed with the key of the array to which it holds the respective link.

For example :

$link[1] => image1.jpg
$link[2] => image2.jpg
$link[3] => image3.jpg
$link[4] => image4.jpg
$link[5] => image5.jpg

We pick up a random number between 1 & 5 by

<?php $n = rand(1,5); ?>

and then display it as

<a href="<?php echo $link[$n]; >"><img src="image<?php echo $n; ?>.jpg" alt="" /></a>

Showing 4 out of 5 items

This was the scenario in my project that I needed to show up 4 selections out of 5 options. The simple trick failed to show distinct items as everytime it selects a random number between 1 & 5 irrespective of whether it’s already selected or not. To avoid this either we store the number selected on each function call in an array and every time we check the selected number with the array. If the number was in the array then we recall the function till we get a new number. We store it and then proceed.

For example :

<?php
$arr[0] = 0;
for($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
{
$go = 0;
while(!$go)
{
$flag = 0;
$n = rand(1,5);
foreach($arr as $k => $v)
{
if($v == $n)
{
$flag = 1;
break;
}
}
if(!$flag)
{
$arr[$i] = $n;
$go = 1;
}
}
}
for($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
{
?>
<a href="<?php echo $link[$i]; ?>"><img src="image<?php echo $i; ?/>.jpg" alt="" /></a>
<?php
}
?>

Better Alternative

The algorithm would become heavy when a large number of selections have to be made as then every new selection would have to be compared with every element of array. In  my scenario I have to made selection of only 4 out of 5.

So instead of randomly selected the numbers of which items are to be displayed, i randomly selected the number of which item is not to be displayed. This was pretty much good in terms of performance.

My Code :

<?php
$kill = mt_rand(1,5);
for($i=1;$i<=5;$i++)
{
if ( $kill == $i )
continue;
?>
<a href="<?php echo $link[$i]; ?>"><img src="image<?php echo $i; ?/>.jpg" alt="" /></a>
<?php } ?>

I use mt_rand function instead of rand function because it is better in terms of performance.

That’s all for this tutorial. Hope you got what I wanted to say. Have any doubts? Feel free to ask in the comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• Show bbPress forum list with posts & topics count in WordPress
• List of topics of a particular bbPress forum
• Show custom excerpts of the post in WordPress
• Show RSS feeds inside WordPress pages through PHP
• Show recent comments of a particular user in WordPress

Lets say we want to have different sidebars as per categories.

Calling different Sidebars

We call the sidebar in our theme (sidebar.php) by a call to the function get_sidebar();

Now if we want to use a different sidebar then create another php file named like sidebar-right.php or sidebar-someother.php, we can call it by get_sidebar(‘right’); and by get_sidebar(‘someother’); respectively.

So we just need to call a function get_sidebar(‘x’); and WordPress will look for a file named sidebar-x.php for creating a sidebar.

Widgetize Sidebars

To widgetize a sidebar we just need to call the function dynamic_sidebar() with the name of that widgetized area. The proper way of doing so is by adding this piece of code

if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Right') ) : ?>
	<p>Add widgets on Right sidebar and they will appear here</p>
	<?php endif; ?>

Similarly do that for all of your sidebars.

Now define them in functions.php file

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
{
    register_sidebar(array(
		'name' => 'Left Sidebar',
        'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</li>',
        'before_title' => '<div class="widget-title">',
        'after_title' => '</div>',
    ));
	register_sidebar(array(
		'name' => 'Right Sidebar',
        'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</li>',
        'before_title' => '<div class="widget-title">',
        'after_title' => '</div>',
    ));
}

Now all of them will show up in Widgets option under your Appearance settings in WordPress.

Calling Sidebars based on Categories

We just need to place the sidebar conditionally by checking for conditions.

For example:

<?php
if ( is_category('1') )
get_sidebar('Left');
elseif ( is_category('2') )
get_sidebar('Right');
else
get_sidebar('someother'); ?>

You can also use the category name instead of category ID in conditions.

Similarly if you want to use the same for multiple categories then it can be done like

<?php
if ( is_category(array(1,3,4,5)) )
get_sidebar('Left');
elseif( is_category('2') )
get_sidebar('Right');
else
get_sidebar('someother'); ?>

The logic of having different sidebars under different conditions are as per ones need and creating them is pretty simple logic. If you need any help, leave here a comment and I will give you the code.

Now that’s done pretty well in WordPress. Similarly you can do that to widgetized multiple areas in your theme. Have any questions? Feel free to ask in comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• Typewith.me let multiple users work on a single document simultaneously
• Shrink Multiple URLs into One by Shrink2One
• Image Batch Processing – Convert / Rename multiple images at once
• Search and Replace text in multiple documents quickly
• Page template usage in WordPress

Since in our implementation, we only be having a single section where I would want to use the WordPress loop so we can straight go ahead and use it. Had you been using WordPress loop somewhere else on the page then you would have to use a different object for the WP loop.

Showing links to latest updates from the blog

<?php $count=3; if (have_posts()) : ?>
<ul>
	<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<?php if($count > 0) { ?>
		<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
	<?php $count--; } endwhile; ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Change the value of count to your choice and there you have a list of latest updates from your blog.

Showing the latest post with an excerpt

I have created a function which you can call anywhere in your theme to do its job of printing the excerpt of the latest post with your specified character limit.

<?php the_post(); ?>
            <h4><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?> - Written on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y'); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h4>

<?php if ( function_exists( 'ashfame_get_stripped_content' ) ) ashfame_get_stripped_content(300); ?>

You can change the value of 300 to the limit of characters you want to display.

Add this function in your functions.php file (under your theme folder only)

function ashfame_get_stripped_content($limit)
{
	$content = get_the_content();
	$words = explode(" ",$content);
	unset($content);
	$length = 0;
	foreach ($words as $i => $w)
	{
		$length += strlen($w);
		if ($length < $limit)
			$content = $content." ".$w;
		else
			break;
	}
	$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content); // We have to do these 2 steps
	$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content); // as per the WP Codex when using get_the_content
	$temp = " (<a title=\"Continue Reading..\" href=\"";
	$temp = $temp.get_permalink();
	$temp = $temp."\">Continue reading &#8594;</a>)</p>";
	$content = str_replace('</p>',$temp, $content);
	echo $content;
}

Showing multiple posts with an excerpt

You will have to execute the WordPress loop here to access multiple posts. You can show multiple posts with an excerpt by calling the function of above case inside the loop like this :

<?php $count=3; if (have_posts()) : ?>
<ul>
	<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<?php if($count > 0) { ?>
		<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
		<?php if ( function_exists( 'ashfame_get_stripped_content' ) ) ashfame_get_stripped_content(300); ?>
	<?php $count--; } endwhile; ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Change the value of count to your choice and there you have multiple posts each with an excerpt. Have any questions then use the Comments section below. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• Show post count and topics started in bbPress
• Show bbPress content inside WordPress
• Show RSS feeds inside WordPress pages through PHP
• Show recent comments of a particular user in WordPress
• Handling WordPress Post Revisions the right way

We will require to use page templates in both the methods, so if you don’t know how to create them, here is a good chance to understand how they work and how you can use them. Read this article – WordPress page templates and come back to this tutorial.

Using Page templates

• Create two page templates. One for the homepage and another for the blog page.
• Create two pages named Home & Blog (You can name them anything)
• Make sure that you select the respective page template while creating them to use the custom layout and content as specified in the page template.
• Make sure that under Reading Settings (Settings > Reading), the FrontPage is set to display static page.
• That’s it. Go check out your homepage and blog page.

Here in this method your posts on the blog are controlled by what you have specified in the Reading settings and in the next method it will depend on the value used in the code.

Personally I use the second method.

Using home.php

• Make sure that under Reading Settings (Settings > Reading), the FrontPage is set to display latest posts.
• Create a page template for blog and one similarly a home.php file for the homepage
• Create a page named Blog and select the blog page template while creating it.
• Place the home.php in your theme folder
• That’s it. Go check out your homepage and blog page.

For content that you need to update manually like some text or anything else, you can widgetised the area too. Then you can add text-widget or anything else.

Blog Page Template Code

<?php
$recentPosts = new WP_Query();
$recentPosts->query('showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged);
if ($recentPosts->have_posts()) : while ($recentPosts->have_posts()) : $recentPosts->the_post(); ?>

	<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
		<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
		<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> by <?php the_author() ?></small>

		<div class="entry">
			<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
		</div>

		<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;'); ?></p>
		<hr />
	</div>

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Subscribe via RSS or via email to keep up with the WordPress as CMS series so as to learn what all crazy stuff you can build with it.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have via the comments. I will be glad to answer them.

• Page template usage in WordPress
• Show bbPress content inside WordPress
• Show custom excerpts of the post in WordPress
• WordPress as CMS basic Setup
• Pagination approach using get_posts() in WordPress

For example : A regular WordPress page generated from page.php of your theme :

<?php get_header(); ?>
    <div class="normal_page">
        <div class="content">
            <!– Content comes here –>
        </div>
        <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
    </div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

For a special page, you don’t want any sidebar. For which the code of the page looks like :

<?php get_header(); ?>
    <div class="normal_page">
        <div class="content">
            <!– Content comes here –>
        </div>
        <div class="advertisement">
            <!– Ad comes here –>
        </div>
        <div class="hire_me">
            <!– Details on hiring me –>
        </div>
        <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
    </div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Creating a Page template in WordPress

Just before the code of that special page, add these lines

<?php
/*
Template Name: Special Page
*/
?>

so that the whole page template file looks like this :

<?php
/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
    <div class="normal_page">
        <div class="content">
            <!– Content comes here –>
        </div>
        <div class="advertisement">
            <!– Ad comes here –>
        </div>
        <div class="hire_me">
            <!– Details on hiring me –>
        </div>
        <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
    </div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

That’s it. Your page template is ready to be used. Just drop the file in your theme folder with any name. However I would recommend giving the template name to the file name too so that it becomes easy to recognize it.

Using a Page template in WordPress

Now when you are creating a new page, you can select the page template under the Attributes tag on the right side.

You can also make the page use by quick editing the page under Edit pages page.

Go fire up your creativity. Now you can have different layouts for different pages. Have any questions then use the Comments section below. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• How to customize your WordPress Blog’s 404 page
• How to take control of the Page Navigation of WordPress
• WordPress Multisite non-WWW forwards to Signup Page Problem Fix
• WordPress as CMS basic Setup
• Building a FrontPage using WordPress

Permalink Settings (Settings > Permalinks)

Set the custom structure to be /%postname%/

Reading Settings (Settings > Readings)

You can set here what your front page displays. Select the page to display as your homepage if you want simple plain content on the main page and if you want a different layout on that page then stick a page template to the page you are using as a homepage.

Alternatively you can build up a home.php file in your WordPress theme and it will automatically be use as your homepage. You can also build it up dynamically using content fetched from custom WP queries.

If you chose the former then you can select another page to become your blog where posts will appear in chronological order and if you chose the later option then you can use another page template to get your blog by using WP queries.

I will demonstrate the usage in the upcoming post of the series till then feel free to respond via the comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

• Integrate bbpress forum with your wordpress setup
• How to setup Gmail in your smartphone
• Setup FeedBurner to tweet new posts to Twitter
• Building a FrontPage using WordPress
• How to setup Gmail IMAP access in your smartphone

Selecting the right webhost is crucial for a web publisher as it keep hosting woes at bay and let the publisher concentrate on what is important i.e. generating content. WpWebHost Offers everything one would expect out of a hosting package. The thing worth mentioning about them is that their servers are specially configured for WordPress users so they give better performance as compared to webhosts which are configured for general use.

By optimization I mean that their servers execute the WordPress script (its a php script after all) fast and hence gives a edge over its competitors. And did I mention that they have got great support? I myself always try out new things with WordPress and whenever I need to contact them, I shoot them a support mail and believe me their support is really awesome (I generally don’t use the word awesome easily but that was the first word which came to my mind).

I almost always get the reply on the same day. Whenever I communicate with their staff, I always feel that I am getting personal attention. They are very friendly. When I signed up for them a few months back, I paid almost a week after using their service because I had some issues with PayPal but they didn’t impose any restriction on me. They even gave me a free week of hosting. That’s cool!

Being WordPress optimized webhost they don’t restrict you in using any other script. I would recommend them to WordPress developers too as you will get great help and support from them.

I need to say it. You will love their service for sure. Now they even have special packages for WordPress MU and recently they added a Semi Dedicated plan which is like powering up your site with a VPS, all which are specially optimized for better performance.

One thing that I would like to mention is that when I bought the hosting, I ended up on a IP Address which was hosting two adult sites too. So as not to harm my SERPs I got a dedicated IP Address for myself. I would have taken it anyway but I took it because at that time I had to.

Their hosting will cost you 5USD per month. I highly recommend WpWebHost. Sign up with them and you won’t regret it.

• WpWebhost WordPress Hosting April Discount Coupon
• Check mail sending capabilities of your webhost
• WpWebHost offers upto 90% hosting discount
• WpWebHost offers 90% OFF on webhosting
• Review : Microtek 800VA Double Battery UPS

FTP

In a FTP connection, the login credentials (username & password) are passed in clear text format and anyone spoofing on the packets can get to know about the login credentials. Moreover, any sensitive data being transferred over a FTP connection is not safe either. The spoofer can have the data very easily. Hence we need something better which overcomes the risky nature of FTP but still can connect like FTP.

SFTP

SFTP is just like a FTP connection with the exception that all of its data is in encrypted form and no-one spoofing on the data can make sense out of it because the data is encrypted. This clearly eliminates the security concern of FTP.

How to use SFTP?

Just like you need a FTP client for connecting via a FTP connection, you need a client which supports SFTP connection over SSH tunnel. My all time favorite Filezilla is capable of connecting via SFTP too. You can see how to use Filezilla for SFTP.

You only need to specify the different port being used for SFTP and the rest are like the FTP credentials only.

You can get to know your SFTP port from your cPanel. Select FTP accounts, then under Account Management, select the option Configure FTP Client and there you can view your SFTP port.

Now just specify the new credentials in the SFTP client and you will be connected to your server safely without the risk of anyone spying on your data.

Enjoy Happy Computing! If you have any questions, then feel free to ask via the comments.

• Install WordPress manually via FTP/SFTP
• Using Filezilla to connect via SFTP
• 3 creative ways of showcasing your best content on sidebar
• Smart way of experimenting with ads performance
• Typewith.me let multiple users work on a single document simultaneously

Difference between a Website & blog

The only difference between the two is in the presentation of the content. The website has several pages with an organized hierarchy and the main page shows up with lots of option to navigation through the content whereas in a blog the content depends a lot on time and that’s why the content is organized in a chronological order (newer articles come up over the previous articles).

Static & Dynamic

Static means that no processing is done other than serving up the ready-made pages. Dynamic means the system is database driven and database driven websites are pretty common these days.

What do you need?

Domain

You will need a domain name that people will open the website / blog by typing the domain. Example: google.com google.net google.org are three different domains. Do some brainstorming and come up with a nice domain name. Preferably go for a .com unless you have a reason not to.

Domain names [.com] costs about 7+USD annually. I buy my domains from Godaddy.

Webhost

You will need a webhost where you can host your files. Take it like this that you need a computer with some space which can provide the site files to anyone opening up your site. This computer remains connected to high speed internet all the time. So this comes up with a price. Free ones are too troublesome. I recommend WPWebHost (WordPress optimized WebHost) for awesome service and support. I use them myself.

WPWebHost costs 5USD monthly and is definitely+ worth it considering their service and insanely awesome support.

WordPress

If you are not starting away with a static website (like uploading html pages) then WordPress is your best bet. They enable millions of publishers to publish content online effortlessly. I use WordPress both as my blogging engine and as CMS. Believe me its one framework that has the power of driving any web project. I myself develop WordPress based web projects. Moreover additional functionality can be added by plugins and there is a arsenal of theme available and one can design a custom theme with ease too.

Download latest version of WordPress

Installing WordPress

There are several methods of installing WordPress :

• Install WordPress via fantastico (Automatic Install)
• Install WordPress via SVN (Geeky but makes upgrading super easy)
• Install WordPress manually (uploading via FTP / SFTP)

If you have any questions about the post then feel free to use the comments section below.

• Deal with Blog Scrappers getting indexed quicker than the original site
• Create PDF pages from URL and embed link in WordPress blog
• How to customize your WordPress Blog’s 404 page
• Add blog feed to Facebook notes
• 5+1 Ways of promoting your Blog/Site/Brand name in your college