To answer the first question, No, this blog was not dead, just kind of unconscious for a few months… 
But now the tutorials are going to flow again…
While the blog was asleep, the inkscape docs crew, in conjunction with the folks over at floss manuals created the official inkscape manual. This is an awesome book that is well worth the time to download, read and utilise.
Also, be sure to forward the links to any tutorials that are not listed on this blog, so they can be posted and shared!
This tutorial is the webpage version of the “Tips and Tricks” tutorial that comes bundled with inkscape. To view these tutorials as an SVG just go to Help>Tutorials in inkscape.
It covers the following tips:
Radial placement with “Tile Clones”, How to do slicing (multiple rectangluar export areas), Non-linear gradients, Excentric radial gradients, Aligning to the center of the page, Cleaning up the document, Clipping or masking a bitmap, Hidden features and the XML editor, Stamping, Pen tool tricks, Entering Unicode values, Using the grid for drawing icons, Object rotation, Open dialog as an object palette, Bitmap drop shadows, Placing text on a path, Selecting the original, Window off-screen recovery, Transparency, gradients and PostScript export
All Languages: 
This tutorial is the webpage version of the “Calligraphy” tutorial that comes bundled with inkscape. To view these tutorials as an SVG just go to Help>Tutorials in inkscape.
It is a fairly in depth introduction into the calligraphy tool and its various options.
All Languages:
This tutorial is the webpage version of the “Tracing a Bitmap” tutorial that comes bundled with inkscape. To view these tutorials as an SVG just go to Help>Tutorials in inkscape.
This tutorial is the webpage version of the “Shapes” tutorial that comes bundled with inkscape. To view these tutorials as an SVG just go to Help>Tutorials in inkscape.
This tutorial covers all the basics on using shapes in inkscape. How to draw, resize and manipulate rectangles, ellipses, spirals, stars & polygons.
This tutorial is the webpage version of the “Advanced” tutorial that comes bundled with inkscape. To view these tutorials as an SVG just go to Help>Tutorials in inkscape.
It covers topics such as Pasting techniques, Drawing freehand and regular paths, Editing paths, Subpaths and combining, Converting to path, Boolean operations, Path Inset and outset, Path Simplification, Creating text, Manual Kerning and the XML editor.
This tutorial is the webpage version of the “Basic” tutorial that comes bundled with inkscape. To view these tutorials as an SVG just go to Help>Tutorials in inkscape.
The Basic Tutorial covers canvas navigation, managing documents, shape tool basics, selection techniques, transforming objects with selector, grouping, setting fill and stroke, alignment, and z-order.
