What is WordPress?

The WordPress.com service recieves 131 million unique visitors a month.Did you know that WordPress is the most popular Content Management System on the web? 15% of all sites online use it to serve up content to their users.

WordPress is a Content Management System that uses PHP to connect to a MySQL database and retrieve & edit the contents of it.

Basically it's ready-made a piece of free software that makes doing a complicated task (creating, editing and retrieving database entries) much more user friendly by offering a GUI for working with it.

The benefits of using a CMS over standard html files are many, the main one is the ability for users to create content without the need to know html or css code, in fact you don't need to know any code at all!

There's even more reasons for you to choose WordPress over plain html. A CMS is dynamic, makes large scale and site wide edits easy.

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Tools For WordPress Bloggers - Jetpack

Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your WordPress.org site.

There seems to be no limit to the amount of tools for bloggers but Jetpack brings a lot of those tools together into one neat & powerful package.

What is Jetpack?

Jetpack is the plugin for self hosted WordPress sites to give those users the same awesome features that users of WordPress.com get with their sites - like social sharing, powerful stats and CDN access. It's maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravitar and Polldaddy. Automattic serve more people per day that many other sites, they do that by trying to make the web better.

The best thing about Jetpack is that it's cloud enabled - it offloads the hard work from your own server to WordPress' super fast could network so you get everything that a self hosted WordPress site has but with all the power of WordPress.com's servers. The list of features keeps growing and as of writing currently Jetpack has 25 individual modules.

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How To Block Adverts on Facebook & Youtube

Blocking adverts on Facebook & Youtube is just as easy as blocking other ads on the internet. Simply Install and activate Adblock Plus.

The kinds of adverts you see on Youtube and Facebook are very different. On Youtube you get some banners, overlay adverts and video adverts. The video adverts are short videos played before content, I often find they are actually the same adverts I see on TV! The overlay adverts pop-up a little way into the video, can either be text or banner and obscure the video. That's exactly the kind of advert, one that obscures the content, that is explicitly forbidden in the Adblock Plus acceptable ads policy. Luckily all 3 of the ad types on Youtube get blocked by default with APB.

Facebook Adverts are something altogether different, they have 7 standard formats and many more supplemental formats. Blocking all of those is a bit more complicated, luckily Adblock and their awesome community have you covered.

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How To Block Online Adverts

You don’t have to see adverts on Facebook, Youtube – or anywhere else on the internet for that matter.

There’s no denying that the whole internet is plastered with adverts, many of them are either annoying, intrusive or both. That’s the kind of advertising that you definitely don’t want to be subjected to. And it’s exactly the kind of adverts that Adblock Plus wants to get rid of.

Many of the ads online are banner adverts, some of them are out of the way but most of them are placed above the fold or within the flow of content. Because of that we’ve become so used to seeing them with the rest of the content that we often look past them as if they weren’t even there. It’s called banner blindness and it’s one of the reasons that adverts keep getting more and more intrusive.

It’s so easy to set up adblocking in your browser all you need to do is install and activate the awesome Adblock Plus plugin.

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Responsive Web Frameworks - Bootstrap

When it comes to creating a website these days you're seriously missing a trick if you don't build a responsive design. Mobile search and interaction is at an all time high and it will only keep growing. 40% of mobile users admit that they just up and leave a site if it isn't optimized for their device. That's a staggering amount of visitors to lose but you won't lose them if you have a responsive site.

Bootstrap - an awesome front end framework

One of the main benefits of starting with a framework is because of the speed that sites can be developed with it. You're not starting from scratch, the frame has been built for you already. One of the most popular frameworks to choose from is Bootstrap.

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