What is RSS Cloud? With the new mention of RSS Cloud by Matt Mullenweg and WordPress, everybody is buzzing about the new term RSS Cloud and what it means to the blogosphere. But what really is RSS Cloud and what does it mean to the everyday web guy/girl like you and me?
What is RSS Cloud?
Quickonlinetips.com wrote it best recently in saying that RSS Cloud “promises to push your blog updates to supported RSS aggregators and feed readers instantly and give real time updates”. In more technical detail Techcrunch.com explains that RSS Cloud is a “new format specification for feeds that solves polling and notification issues. It works by adding a <cloud> element to a feed which describes the path to a cloud server that should be notified when a feed is updated. The cloud server, in-turn, will send the updated feed content to all subscribers and aggregators.”
How is this different [...]

What if you want a forum on your blog? Well there are plenty of open source forum systems available. But what about integrating your blog cms with your new forum? There are some effective WordPress plugins to help you accomplish this. But choosing the right one is critical. There are many plugins to help you accomplish this, but I found 5 that actually do what they say they do!
1. bbPress – Far & Away The BEST Option
http://bbpress.org/
Pound for pound bbPress is your best option for integrating a full fledged forum into your blog. bbPress has a very simple interface which makes it very popular amongst it’s users. The templates are easy to customize. In fact they are just as easy to customize as WordPress templates. And the plugin actually integrates the forum database with your WordPress database, that way the integration is seamless.

2. Forum Server
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/forum-server/
Forum Server is a plugin [...]

When it comes to WordPress plugins the most important thing is that they are updated to work with the most recent version of WordPress. Otherwise you’re stuck depending on a plugin that is not advancing with WordPress. There are tons of video plugins for WordPress that give WordPress all sorts of video type functionality, but finding those that actually worked was a chore! I’ve listed 9 of what I feel are the best video plugins for WordPress right now. Not only do these plugins have awesome features, they also work!

1. Smart YouTube
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-youtube/
A plugin from Vladimir Prelovac that allows you to easily insert YouTube videos and playlists into your blog posts, comments, and RSS feeds.The problem with some of the other WordPress plugins that accomplish this such as the Video Quicktags plugin, is that they don’t embed the video properly which would make it so the video wouldn’t show up [...]

What if you could build your own Google Analytics program? What if instead of having to use a 3rd party service such as Google Analytics, I told you that you could host your own application and keep all your website statistical information private? That’s what Piwik is for! Piwik is an open source web analytics application written in PHP and MySQL that you can install and manage on your own web server. I literally just finished installing it 5 minutes ago on my Dreamhost server and it is working like a charm.

Why would you want to do this? Well there are several reasons and benefits behind hosting your own analytics application. Let’s talk about a few of these.
Reason #1: Your information is private. Keep it that way!
Not that Google is interested in throwing your information around to the world or anything. But it’s nice, especially when you work online for [...]

I wrote a post quite a while back about Drupal & Ubercart and got an overwhelming response. So apparently my audience loves Ubercart! Which is a good thing considering Ubercart is “da bomb.com” if you know what I mean. So I wanted to take some time and put together a tutorial on how to Install Drupal & Ubercart and get it up and running. In this case I am using a Dreamhost server which works perfectly with Drupal and Ubercart.
Step 1: Download Drupal version 5 and Ubercart 1.7
At the time I am writing this tutorial, this is the most recent production version of Ubercart. And it requires version 5 of Drupal.
Let’s Install Drupal!
Step 2: Upload the Drupal contents into your directory of choice via FTP.
In this case I created a new directory called “Ubercart” and uploaded all files located in the “drupal” folder into it.
Step 3: Go to your Dreamhost [...]

Pubwich is an open source data aggregation application built in PHP. In human words, it’s an application that you can run that aggregates RSS feeds from various locations into one, slick looking html webpage! Pubwich only needs an Apache server, with PHP and Pear configured properly to run. The screenshot below gives you a better example of what i’m talking about:

Pubwich is currently able to display content published with these social media applications:

Facebook
Twitter
Delicous
Flickr
Last.fm
Vimeo
Youtube
Readernaut
And any other RSS feed

My Recommendation!
If you have not already purchased a domain name for your name I would recommend doing so. You can use this open source application as the page for your domain name that aggregates the data from all of your social activity. Simple! In a couple of minutes you have a slick html webpage that is up to the minute information on your online internet activities.