Finally, after several days of “painful” configuration, Bloggista.net is now live “again” and ready to serve your free blogging needs. The new Bloggista.net comes with lots of goodies that will surely please both newbie and pro-bloggers alike:

1. Better interface and themes.
2. Premium plugins available to members.
3. Now members have an option to upgrade their blogs to avail of lots of better looking themes and great plugins.
4. 25/75 Revenue-sharing! Yes, you read it right: 75% goes to you, 25% goes to Bloggista.net. Just check out the “Advertising” section in your dashboard to configure your ad settings.
5. Better control against spammers and spam blogs – although not perfect, but at least spammers are blocked 60% to 80% of the time.
6. Better Group and Forum features.
7. Blogs are now served through multiple databases – so basically, no more dangers of losing or re-configuring your posts in the future.
8. And soon – the ability to use your own DOMAIN NAME instead of a Bloggista.net subdomain. This is achieved by simply mapping your Bloggista.net subdomain blog to your own DOMAIN NAME.

New to blogging and clueless as to how to start a blog? Bloggista.net now comes with handy on-screen TUTORIALS and BLOGGING WIZARD which provide easy step-by-step instructions on how to blog – from selecting a Theme to publishing your first post!

What can be more cooler than that? And it doesn’t stop there – when you login to your blog dashboard, you will see those handy-dandy TOOLTIPS and HELP buttons which tell you exactly what a particular feature or function is all about.

Are you ready to experience a different way, yet so easy way to blog? Get your own Bloggista.net blog today and don’t worry, it’s free and you even earn money from it!

Bloggista.net – a free blog service and a social network site is going to make a major overhaul.

First, we will be transferring to a new and better server. Second, most recent upgrade of WordPress requires an alignment of all Bloggista.net file structure, thus, YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO BACK-UP YOUR BLOG POSTS as soon as possible.

If you have a blog – you need to do this mandatory backup so that you will be able to restore your posts when the new Bloggista.net files are installed and upgraded.

This method will also help us easily weed out the SPAM BLOGS from REAL BLOGS. The new upgrade will have more secured features to avoid signup from SPAMMERS who not only plague us with worthless posts, but also rob us of costly server space and bandwidth.

All BLOGS should be backed-up no later than May 8, 2010.

To backup your blog posts, comments, images, tags and other blog settings, simply follow the following instruction:

1. Login to your Blog’s ADMIN e.g. yourblog.bloggista.net/wp-admin
2. Once logged in to your Dashboard, find TOOLS.
3. Go to TOOLS > EXPORT.
4. Follow the simple EXPORT instructions.
5. Save the file (in XML) format.
6. Once done, wait until the announcement is made to have your blog restored.

To restore your BLOG, simply login to your Dashboard, go to TOOLS > IMPORT and follow the instructions – but don’t do this until we make the announcements.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Happy Bloggin!

Want a quick way of displaying YouTube videos in your blog? The plugin Smart YouTube will do the trick.

Go to your blog’s Dashboard, check out the Plugins section and look for the Smart YouTube video plugin. Activate it, and optionally you can change its settings in the Settings section.

It also works pretty well out of the box.

Now to insert a YouTube video in your blog post, simply copy the video URL (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmcHwEn0m7U) and put a “v” after “http” to look like this “httpv://www.youtube….. “.

Your YouTube video should be displayed like the example below, a YouTube video of

World of Warcraft Cataclysm Blizzcon 2009 Debut Trailer

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmcHwEn0m7U

To see more options, check out the Smart Youtube plugin settings page. Other video display options are as follows:

• httpv:// -- regular video
• httpvh:// -- high quality
• httpvhd:// -- HD quality
• httpvp:// -- playlist

Enjoy!

Creating a blog

The next big step is to drive visitors or readers to your site. Nothing beats the the sight of seeing people reading your posts, and leaving comments to each of the articles you wrote.

Here are some basic ways to drive traffic to your blog:

1. Tell your friends and relatives you just created a blog, via email or by visiting their blogs, friendster, facebook, myspace or multiply account (if they have one) and just leave a short note telling them to visit your site. Of course, don’t forget to write the link to your Bloggista.net blog.
2. Visit other blogs – either another Bloggista.net blog or some other blogs. Read their posts, leave some sincere comments. This is one of the most simple, yet effective way of getting people to discover you and your blog.
3. Update your blog regularly – at least once a week so that people have something new to read whenever they get to visit you again.
4. Reply to your visitor’s comments. Its a great way to initiate discussions and exchange of views regarding your articles.
5. Join some social network sites to discover new friends and share with them your articles and other peoples’ articles. Some of the popular blog social network sites that you can share your articles, and also discover great articles from other members:

• Digg.com
• Stumbleupon
• Reddit
• Blogjoints
• Facebook
• Twitter

These sites allow you to register as a member, then submit your articles or let your network friends to submit the articles for you. Once your article has been submitted, other members can see it and if they find the article title interesting, they will visit your blog.

Try it, and goodluck!

Tip: To faciliate easy submission of your blog posts to these social networking sites, either by yourself or by anybody else, activate the “Add To Any” plugin found in your Dashboard > Plugins >.

About Bloggista.net

Bloggista.net is a free wordpress powered blog site based in the Philippines and is also a social network site.

All Bloggista.net Groups should now be able to create their Forums. A minor glitch which caused major inconvenience has been rectified.

The Group Forum is the best way to discuss and share ideas than the Group Wire.

All Group Admins can enable the Forum when creating the Group. If your Forum still doesn’t work, try this:

Go to Group> Admin > Group Settings:

• Uncheck (if already checked) “Enable Group Discussion” then click “Save.”
• Then Check again “Enable Group Discussion” and click “Save.”
• Try to create a test Forum topic – this should now work.

Contact me if you still can’t get this working.

Cheers!

First, you can put a widget on your sidebar and show your Flickr Photos by activating the flickrRSS plugin. Simply go to Plugins, find the flickrRSS plugin, activate it and follow the simple instruction found in Settings > flickrRSS.

This is the better way of sharing your photos since you will not be using up any space on your Bloggista.net blog (which is currently limited only to 20MB).

Or, if you like to share a few great photos of yours, you can upload it into your Album. To upload photos to your Album, go to your Profile and click on Album > Upload Picture.

Here’s a screenshot of the Album feature:

Browse the picture you want to upload and simply put a title and description of your picture. Click on ‘Upload Photo‘ once done.

The picture should be uploaded and displayed like this:

As much as possible, to save on disk space, try to limit the size of your picture to less than 100Kb or even better, less than 70kb. This not only save space, but also makes your photos load faster especially for people who are using slower internet connections.

You can use image tools like Photoshop to reduce the size of your images. If you don’t have a Photoshop, you can download GIMP, a free open source image tool which is easy to use and can resize, edit and enhance images.

Here’s an example of a photo album. Enjoy!

On top of the Free Blog, which is now running using the latest version of WordPress blogging platform, Bloggista.net have these new cool features:

1. Create your Social Profile, upload avatar
2. Create public or private Groups, and join other groups
3. Create Forums and moderate your own forums
4. Connect with other members, add friends, send private messages
5. Post messages on The Wire – which works like Twitter, try it!
6. Create albums from Flickr or upload your own photos
7. … and more features coming like Chat, Videos, Classified ads, create your own Online Store to name a few

Now there’s more reasons why you should check back at Bloggista.net – and don’t forget to invite your friends to join too and let our community grow!

What surprised me was that the upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 was easier than going to the toilet and flush it. The upgrade was automatic – unlike the previous versions where upgrading was really a painful experience for a guy like me not into this techie stuff.

And now the coolest part is – plugins can also be updated automatically, just like what the standard single user WordPress blog does for quite some time.

So enjoy blogging – and watch out for new themes and more useful plugins soon.

Also, a Bloggista.net Forum will be added to serve as FAQ and Support site, and hopefully its community driven. I’m already tired of answering all issues and support queries by email.

Watch out for it!

A new feature of WordPress 2.6.2 is the automatic display of the latest News and Post at Bloggista.net main blog page into the individual blog Dashboards – this ensure all Bloggista.net bloggers are informed and updated of any recent news, updates, changes and other useful information. But still, we strongly recommend that you subscribe to the email RSS feeds of the main blog.

New Themes are available that are compatible with WordPress 2.6.2

New plugins were also added to help manage and improve the performance of each blogs. These are:

1. WP-Spamfree Plugin – a very powerful anti-spam plugin that eliminates spam in comments.
2. Ultimate Google Analytics – a plugin that enables each blog to track statistics: number of visits per day, where visitors came from, keywords searches, outbount links clicks, inbound links plus many more. Go check out the Plugins page of your blog and add the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. Important: You need to signup for a Google Analytics account.

In the coming days, new plugins will be installed to improve the performance and speed of all Bloggista.net blogs.

The upgrade should be painless – and should take not more than an hour, if everything goes well.

Check back soon for a new and different Bloggista.net blog.