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

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.

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!

Adding videos to your blog is pretty much easy with the plugin, Pro Player. To use Pro Player Video plugin, go to your Blog Dashboard > Plugins > and look for Pro Player plugin. Click on “Activate” and it should be ready to add videos to your blog posts.

Now when you “Add a New Post“, you should see the Pro Player icon in the post toolbar (see image below).

Click on the Pro Player icon and the video panel will be displayed. To insert a Youtube video, simply copy the Youtube URL, ex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYhrYHmUPn0.

You can play around with the size of the video. The video in this example has a width of 550 and height of 340.

It is recommended to set auto repeat and auto start to “False”.

That’s it! Go try it yourself and don’t forget to share your video post with your friends! Here’s a sample Youtube video of Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours – Live Version.

[pro-player width='550' height='340' type='video']http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYhrYHmUPn0[/pro-player]

Yep, you read it right! Bloggista.net is not just serving you Free Blogs but is now a full-featured Social Network Site. You should check out the homepage to see the cool new look (like Facebook eh?).

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.

Win an Easy USD100 and Surprise Prizes on Bloggista.com. Simply think of your best definition of the word ‘Bloggista” and post it in your blog to grab a chance to win USD100.00 and many surprises.

Top 10 Blogs will also be selected and each will receive USD10.00 for being just part of the Top 10. Now that’s more than what Smorty or SocialSpark could give out for a write up of no more than 50 words and maximum of 3 sentences. You also need to provide a sample usage of the word “Bloggista“.

For more details about this contest, jump to  post. Of course you need a blog to participate, if you don’t have one yet, you can sign-up for a Free Wordpress Blog at Bloggista.net.