Time to kick back and learn some new things?

Here’s a handy list of links of our book reviews of web design, technology, digital media, workplace, and other book categories from the Mightyblog during 2009-10. See what you may have missed on the bookshelves. Tell us what you think about the ones you’ve already absorbed into your brain. Happy reading!

This morning I ran across WPTouch from Brave New Code and admittedly was a bit dubious when the company claimed it could make my WordPress blog iPhone-friendly with just a few clicks. But lo and behold, that’s all it took and the result was super impressive.

Using an outdated system to manage your website’s content is fraught with many potential problems, including the possibility that the site could get hacked. Arts organizations and non-profits are particularly susceptible to this because they are often resource-constrained in technical departments and if they have IT resources at all, upgrading the website’s content management system typically isn’t at the top of an already long list of needs.

WordPress 2.7 Complete by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder is a great resource for bloggers and web designers to get a good handle on how the WordPress system works, where its strengths and weaknesses lie, and how to customize it to suit your needs.

The book covers both interface training and code development with equal facility. If you merely want to learn how to install the application, add themes and plug-ins, and get blogging, there is plenty of information here for you. If you want to dive into PHP to create your own themes, plug-ins, widgets, and so on, the book offers step-by-step instructions for this as well. It also covers how you can use WordPress as a complete CMS, which is helpful since WordPress has long had the reputation of being merely a blogging tool.

WordPress, Expression Engine, and Drupal have become the de facto tools we use to build many web-based projects these days.

Blogging software and content management systems (CMS) not only empower our clients to maintain their own sites, but also increase search engine rankings and simplify the process by which they integrate the Web into daily business routines.