Every week I’m going to start linking out to some interesting WordPress related articles, themes, plugins, and other worthy resources - starting today. Here it goes…

24 Ways To Contribute To WordPress - A great article by Jeff Chandler of Weblogtoolscollection, outlining several ways to contribute to the WordPress community.

10 Twitter Users You Should Follow - This article by Michael Castilla of WPCandy lists 10 users you should follow on Twitter, who frequently “tweet” about WordPress news. I’ve never really got into Twitter, but just in case…here’s my Twitter profile for future reference.

WP Freemium - A great free WordPress theme by Ptah Dunbar. Premium in quality, freemium in price. Looks like it’s great for ad space too.

Matt M To Be On WordPress Weekly - To those of you who don’t know, Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, is scheduled to be on the WordPress Weekly podcast tonight at 9 PM EST.

Best Resources for WordPress - Round 1 - Pavel Ciorici of WPZoom has an excellent list of even more WordPress resources. Check it out.

That’s all for this week. If anyone has any tips for a Twitter newbie (such as myself), feel free to let me know in the comments.

ProBlogger.net, an extremely popular blogging blog, recently published an article about ad positioning, and how inline ads outperformed other ad positions for him. After this is done, you’ll be able to add inline advertisements to specific posts using custom fields. Not just that, but you’ll be able to specify the ad size as well. Now I know there may be WordPress plugins that are able to do this for you, but this tutorial will go over how to do it manually by editing your WordPress theme.

• A simple diagram of a layout with inline ads in the content
• What a custom field is, what they do, and what their purpose is
• Edit your WordPress theme to accommodate custom fields
• Add a class to your stylesheet to properly display inline ads
• Use a custom field key and value to specify which ad size to use

Maximize your ad revenue by implementing these techniques in your WordPress theme and read on…

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Today we have another excellent template designed by Rambling Soul, and ported into WordPress by me. This free WordPress theme has all the usual features - widgetized sidebar, native Gravatar (WordPress 2.5 and above only) and tagging support. Along with those, there is also a theme options page, details of which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the details of the theme options page…

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I know this tip may be very obvious to some, but I keep seeing “admin” as the author name on many WordPress blogs. I thought I’d write this quick tip post because these WordPress bloggers may not even know how to change the publicly displayed author name. Fortunately, this is very simple to do. In your WordPress admin panel, select Users -> Your Profile. On this page, enter whatever you want as your nickname, and click “Update Profile.”

Once that’s done, select this newly created nickname from the “Display name publicly as” dropdown menu. Update your profile again, and that’s it.

If you want to test out a WordPress theme before it goes live on your blog, then I’ve found the perfect WordPress plugin for you. It is called Theme Test Drive. It’s very simple to use. Get the plugin from here at the WordPress.org plugin directory, install the plugin, and activate. On your design menu, select the theme you wish to preview from the dropdown menu and enable it.

The theme will be visible to you (the admin) only. Make sure you disable any “cache” plugins before using Theme Test Drive, as it will likely cause problems. Enjoy!

Here’s another clean blog layout from Styleshout, ported into WordPress by myself. It would be great for any type of tech-oriented blog. The sidebar is widget-ready and comments have Gravatar support (WordPress 2.5 and above).

Live Demo | Download

There have been lots of complaints about WordPress’ visual editor. It adds extra (usually unwanted) formatting whenever you have a line break. It’s just a pain to deal with. Understandably, I personally never use it. For those who may not be knowledgeable at HTML, there are excellent alternatives available. In this guide I’ll go over:

• TinyMCE Advanced
• Dean’s FCKEditor
• How to disable the visual editor

If you’re fed up with the default WordPress visual editor, I suggest you read on.

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To anyone that isn’t aware, Lester Chan (GaMerZ) is a WordPress plugin author that has released some very useful plugins that I use myself on this site, including the WP-PageNavi (for page navigation) and Download Manager (for tracking downloads on the free WordPress themes page).

He has just announced a few days ago a large portion of his plugins are now updated and compatible with WordPress 2.5 and above. The full list of updated plugins can be viewed on that link. For the remaining plugins, there are beta versions available on the Downloads page. These are supposed to work with 2.5, but have not been thoroughly tested and therefore, still in beta.

This is a very nice looking magazine theme, originally designed by Rambling Soul, called Tomodachi. On the homepage, there are areas for the latest post and an author’s box - where images can be used through custom fields. There are two sidebars, both of which are widget-ready. Native Gravatar (WordPress 2.5+ only) and tagging support is also present within the theme.

Live Demo | Download

And now on to the features in greater detail…

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As you returning website visitors can see, Theme Lab now has a new design. If you’re currently reading via RSS, please take a minute and have a look for yourself. It was designed by TheHiveDesigns.com, provider of custom quality web 2.0 designs, and coded by XHTMLValid.com coding services.

Why the change? I felt after several months of the same design, it was time for a fresh look. Theme Lab is growing every day and I also wanted more room to “expand” if needed. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below. Hope you all like it!