Ever wonder how those really sexy looking tag cloud animations are made?
If you are running a WordPress site, the easy answer is WP-Cumulus, a plugin that automatically generates a flash based, interactive animation using the tags you have assigned to your blog posts.
You can set all of the dimensions, colours and rotation speed through the back-end administration page, and can even utilise it as a widget for sidebars and footers.

Okely-dokely, hosting a website.
One of the most important parts of running your own website is the hosting, if you don’t get it right first time around, it can be a serious pain in the arse.
You can Google for web hosting companies any day of the week and be bombarded with a myriad of impressive, graphic-heavy websites advertising the biggest and best of everything.
Unfortunately the best most of these people can expect is a mediocre, unresponsive and sometimes downright dishonest service.

It is difficult to express how important it is today to backup your work and your website is no exception.
Security threats are constant and accidents can happen.
A tedious task to be sure and something everyone would prefer was automated and invisible.
Fortunately for WordPress users, an extremely simple to use plugin is available that I recommend to everyone, and that is BackWPup.
Install it, activate it, select a backup location option and Robert’s your mothers brother!

If you run a WordPress site which allows visitors to comment on your content, then you know how big a problem online spam can be.
Fortunately there is a solution, and that is called Akismet.
Akismet is a hosted web service that saves you time by automatically detecting comment and trackback spam.
It comes preloaded into WordPress as a plugin but many people overlook what is one of the most valuable features at their disposal.

Login Lockdown has become a part of my standard WordPress install now, it is THAT GOOD!
It records the IP address and time-stamp of every failed login attempt to your site and If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a specific period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.
Acting as a firewall for your website, it helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

Mazda garage just quoted me £179.87 + VAT for a new remote central locking key fob, with a £35 + VAT charge for programming it.
Total cost to do it yourself? £24 for a Fob and 30 seconds to program.
This was a bugger to find so thought I would share the wealth.

First of all, welcome to my new website!
I get bored fairly quickly with my designs and am always looking to improve them – so this is actually the fifth or sixth incarnation of tomfreeman.co.uk.
As you can probably see I have decided to use WordPress for my site; I in fact use it for almost all my sites. This is for a number of reasons but mainly because in my opinion it is just a better content management system than Joomla, Drupal etc.
The exceptional database of free plugins and extensions available for WordPress alone makes it worth some serious consideration.
This website will probably be a bit of a mishmash, not just a portfolio of my past works but a range of interesting articles that might be useful to people.
As I mention in my About Me page, one of the causes I am a supporter of is online privacy; as such I feel it is important that everyone know the importance of protecting themselves online from nefarious individuals and big brother states.
I will be publishing guides in the not-to-distant future on how to secure your machine; I will also be posting web design tips and tricks such as WordPress plugin recommendations and security best practice.
Submissions from the public are always welcome so if you have anything you would like to send in to share, then please feel free.