Wordpress

Wordpress (wordpress.org) is one of the best software tools you can use to start your own weblog, but it has additional hidden power that makes it suitable for other things too.
The open source blogging platform has come a long way in the last three years, taking on the dominant player Movable Type and forcing it to play catch-up in some important areas.
The free Wordpress hosting service at wordpress.com has also been a huge success, pulling in hundreds of thousands of new users.
Built inside Wordpress is the ability to manage a series of pages, as well as manage a blog. This is where the software's hidden power lies.
People who want to manage a small web site, especially businesses, usually end up having to pay money for a backend system that lets them edit pages, upload images and so on. This kind of setup is known as a "Content Management System" or CMS.
Because Wordpress copes so well with these non-blog style pages, it becomes a very capable website CMS, if configured the right way.
Hidden inside the Wordpress control panel is a switch that displays one of the static pages as the site's home page, not the blog that it would display by default. It's easy to build up a bunch of pages about you, your project, your business or organisation, and set one of them as the Wordpress front page.
From then on you can ignore the blogging functionality, and just use the pages system to maintain your web site.
Wordpress is popular for many reasons. It comes with a collection of well-designed themes, giving you the chance to create a very professional-looking web site with the minimum of effort. The most popular themes, however, are a bit over-used these days, and it might be a good idea to consider looking around for something a little more unique. There are thousands of themes to found online, either free or for very low prices.
If you have the know-how, you can build your own design within Wordpress. It takes some expertise with CSS and PHP - and if you need to ask what those acronyms stand for, that kind of customisation is probably not for you anyway.
Another good reason to like Wordpress is the way it has been built; the main software can be further enhanced with plugins, which are simple to install and activate. Plugins can do all sorts of things, from changing the look of the site, giving it more features, or just keeping the whole setup more secure.
Overall, Wordpress is an excellent choice for people wishing to build all manner of low-cost, simple web sites. It goes a long way beyond plain old blogs, and thanks to the plugins system, has plenty of potential to offer more in the future.
+ Fly me to the moon +
Google, never short of a few dollars, has offered a multi-million dollar cash prize to anyone who can build a robot, send it to the moon, and successfully get video data beamed back to Earth. All of this has to be achieved by midnight on December 31st, 2012. The prize?
Twenty million of your Earth dollars. Time to dig out the old schoolboy science kit and see how your robotics skills are doing...
+ It's my PC and I'll cry if I want to +
There was much fuss last week, after Microsoft was accused of releasing an update to Windows Vista that installs itself quietly in the background, with no warning to users about what's happening. Angry Windows users responded with threats to switch to Linux, when they heard about the so-called "undercover updates" that had been downloaded by their PCs during the night. In truth, this is nothing new at all. The Windows Update software has been around since the early days of Windows XP, and clearly informs users that once activated, it will do exactly what caused a fuss last week - download new updates during the night, and install them. As far as Microsoft is concerned, it's just another means of keeping those computers as secure as possible.
+ Browsing around +
:: Done a good turn for anyone lately?
www.one-good-turn.co.uk
:: Make your own books; sell them through Amazon www.createspace.com
:: Smashing telly, it's smashing
www.smashingtelly.com
:: Statetris: it's Tetris, but with US states www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa