The short answer is Yes!

The long answer is Yes, but might not be the best of idea’s if you have not started your blog or site and are asking the question. If you are planning to start a personal blog or site without much inspiration to conquer the masses then a wordpress.com blogging platform is your way to go, but if you are planning to have anything remotely commercial with your site / blog then you should at least get your own domain and point it over to wordpress.com. Doing so will require you to join the Premium Features of wordpress.com and start to cough up a few dollars. So if you have opened your wallet already, then you might as well go pro and get your own domain and some simple hosting to go with it. As you might already know, I use Dreamhost for all small customer blog and sites, and starting out with self hosted WordPress has a handfull of advantages :

• Choose from any available theme free or commercial , I love to recommend themeforest for great themes with a small price.
• You can install any plug-in you wish.
• Easy to upgrade and move to another host if your site gets really big.
• Use your own domain name
• Have your own email address on your domain name and even start to work with Google Apps (Yes – I recommend it).
• From an SEO standpoint you have some really neat tools and features that are not available on the wordpress.com platform
• Host the site in your own country on local hosting servers, especially important for non US blogs.
• You can edit the CSS and make small modifications to the theme when required
• Get your self hosted WordPress installed for FREE with bloginstall.com

These are just a few points off the top of my head, I am sure that I can add a few more.

There is one nice little feature that comes with the wordpress.com “Premium Features” – VideoPress, it costs about 60 bucks a year and will allow you to stream and manage HD video on your blog. Usually I would just point you in the direction of youtube or vimeo , but VideoPress does have a list of nifty features that might be worthwhile if you go heavy on video.

There are many ways to keep your blog data safe for a rainy day, you can start by using a host that keeps an accessable snapshot backup of your blog data (the actual ftp directory) and your MySQL database. This alone can save the day in most cases of a fire .

In other cases when the snapshots are not sufficient due to some tech guy that accidently split coffee over the backups it is advice to keep an offsite copy of your WordPress files and media. If you only update you blog once every blue moon, then you can stick to a manual backup of your data once on a while, but if you are a problogger or are using WordPress for a content thirsty commercial websites then you surly need some real assurance that you are not going to get wet.

Manual Backup of your WordPress blog

If you are already friendly with FTP and know how to install a plugin or two you can easily backup your site by downloading the following directories :

/wp-content/themes
/wp-content/plugins
/wp-content/uploads

I strongly suggest un-selecting the option “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders” in the Settings > Miscellaneous WordPress menu. In addition to these directories you also need to create a backup of your WordPress database. I recommend installing the wp-dbmanager plugin, this little goody with easily help you create a backup file of your database and if you set up the plugin it can even email you the database backup file once in a while (whenever you decide). It is an old plugin that still does a great job!

VaultPress Coming Soon!

The guys that created WordPress did it again… and they are now offering out beta access to a new real time backup service called VaultPress. A nifty name for a simple service that makes sure that your entire WordPress enviroment is safely stored away. The service requires installing a plugin on your WordPress that takes care of the whole process in the background. I am sure that it also takes care of optimizing the backup process to minimize the amount of data that is required to be sent over to the backup cloud. You can read more about it on there blog. They are currently in beta so go try it out before the beta is over.

Managing these META tags with the help of a plugin helps keep your tags nice and tidy even when changing themes.

I will show here how to create your own little plugin to manage your HTML META tags and make sure that they never get lost again.

Below you will find a snippet of code that you can put in a empty my_header_plugin.php and place in your plugin directory.

You may find some examples for the top 3 search engines webmaster tool verification META tags used to verify ownership of your site.

Just replace the placeholders below with your valid keys.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: My META tags
Version: 0.1
Plugin URI: http://blog-install.com/plugins/
Description: Insert META tags into your HTML headers
Author: blog-install.com
Author URI: http://blog-install.com
*/

function insert_my_meta_tag() {
echo <<<EOT
<meta name="blogcatalog" content="INSERT_BLOG_CATALOG_HERE">
<meta name="verify-v1" content="INSERT_GOOGLE_WEBMASTER_KEY_HERE">
<meta name="y_key" content="INSERT_YAHOO_WEBMASTER_KEY_HERE">
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="INSERT_MSN_WEBMASTER_KEY_HERE">
EOT;
}
add_action('wp_head', 'insert_my_meta_tag',3);
?>

The basic line that you will need to include is the following :

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?user=[your_flickr_ID]">

Replace the ID with your flickr ID. You can obtain your flickr ID from idgettr.com.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=4&amp;size=m&amp;display=latest&amp;layout=x&amp;source=user&amp;user=47244499%40N00"></script>

You may change the following parameters as your like :

count : number of images shown from 1 to 10.

size : represents the size of the image. s for standard, t for thumbnail or m for medium

layout : h – horizontal , v – vertical, x – not styled

display : latest, random

source : user, user_tag, user_set, group, group_tag, all, all_tag

Once selected a source, you must add up to two more parameters specifying the tag(s) and / or the IDs of the group or set. These parameters are tag (tag name), group (group number value that can be found with idgettr), and set (number that can be found in the url of the specific set for example when the url is …/sets/123456/ the set ID is 123456).

The badge API creates the following HTML for each images displayed :

<div id="flickr_badge_image1" class="flickr_badge_image">
<a href="[the photo page]">
<img width="[width]" height="[height]" src="[url]" title="[title]" alt="Great Photo from flickr" />
</a>
</div>

You may alter the styling for the flickr_badge_image class and / or each image via the image id.

You might also want to try using the flickr-widget wordpress plugin for adding flickr photos to as a widget in the sidebar. Requires a widget enabled theme.

Step 1

You may add the following to then of your theme footer.php , just before the closing tag of the </body> tag.

<ul id="twitter_update_list"><li></li></ul>

You may change the number of count to any number you want to show count number of tweets.

Step 2

Add the following script where you want to place the twitter update :

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/bloginstall.json?callback=twitterCallback2&amp;count=1"></script>

If you don’t have the technical skills to do it yourself, this is where we come in handy! I am an experienced web developer with hundreds of professional wordpress installation left behind. So for the aspiring blogger that wants to have a quick start in the right direction and get the most out of their blog signup today for free. Yes, all for the cost of nothing.

Though installation of the basic setup of WordPress is easy for anyone to do on their own host with an automatic setup using Fantastico, there is much more to WordPress than the initial setup.

I am offering the a WORDPRESS QuickStart Setup Package right out of the box for free.

The QuickStart package incldues :

1. Help purchase and configure your domain name – check availability
2. Setup a professional email with Google Apps (free)
3. Submit your blog to Google, Yahoo and other major search engines
4. Setting up permalink structure + Optimize your blog for Search Engine Ranking
5. Optimize your blog for Adsense (if required)
6. Setup Feedburner account to handle your RSS subscribers
7. Setup Email subscription
8. Configure Google Webmaster Sitemap
9. Install the Top 10 plugins for wordpress
10. Automate daily / weekly backup of your blog
11. If required, we’ll do the transfer for you

All this for the Cost of Nothing ? what is the catch ?
If they say “There is No Free Lunch”, they are wrong! We are providing a complete package for you for free when you sign up with of our approved hosting providers, which in turn will pay us a referral fee for each new client.  So take advantage of this win-win package TODAY!

But I need the thing-a-ma-jig plugin
We are serious about our installations, so we pre-install for you a selection of Top 10 plug-ins :

1. XML Sitemap
2. Related posts
3. Sociable (social bookmarking)
4. cforms II (contact form)
5. Lightbox (enhanced image display)
6. PingPressFM (automatic updates to your social media)
7. Subscribe remind
8. WP Super Cache
9. Breadcrumbs
10. Smart Youtube (automatic adding of Youtube movies)

What if I already own a hosting provider ?
We will charge a one-time fee of $97 to have your blog setup professionally in less than 48 hours.

Note: To qualify for a complete blog setup package, you must sign up with our hosting provider dreamhost and contact us with the details using the form below and let us take care of everything else.

Feel free to tweet @bloginstall for help on any wordpress related issues!

<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’);}
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ – ‘ ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() )      { bloginfo(‘name’); echo ‘ | ‘;single_post_title(); }
elseif (is_page() )        { bloginfo(‘name’); echo ‘ | ‘; single_post_title(); }
elseif ( is_404() )         { bloginfo(‘name’); print ‘ | Not Found’; }
elseif ( is_search() )   { bloginfo(‘name’); print ‘ | Search results for ‘ . wp_specialchars($s); pageGetPageNo(); }
else { wp_title(”,true); }
?>
</title>

You may edit the header.php under Appearance > Editor