Blogging Sueblimely

I am listing the plugins I have implemented for WordPress in the order of my view of how I rate their importance/necessity. In some cases there are alternatives based on personal preference. I will detail these in a separate post.

Important Plugins

Akismet a tool designed stop comment and trackback spam is built into WordPress. To add to this protection I installed Bad Behaviour – which is designed to complement other link spam solutions. It’s aim is top prevent spammers from even delivering their unwanted offerings, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. Bad Behaviour is available for other PHP based sites too.

All-in-one-SEO-Pack – a powerful plugin that takes the hard work out of optimizing your blog for search engines. I will describe this one more soon as some customizing is needed to take advantage of its full features.

Google Sitemaps Generator - to help this blog get listed and ranked. Here is some info on sitemaps in case you want to find out more.

Dofollow – Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin I wrote a guest post on the subject of nofollow on Blog-Blond a little while ago.

Andy Beard has published a list of utilities that remove nofollow from WordPress, Blogspot, Movable Type and Typepad - Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks

ShareThis - a compact little share this button to allow readers to subscribe or favorite your post on various social networking and bookmarking sites. A simple plugin to implement. This feature is available for other blogging platforms too ShareThis for Publishers. I have been using it on Blogger for a while.

There are other such bookmarking plugins, which you choose is really a matter of personal taste.

Subscribe to Comments – To allow readers to subscribe to post comments by email. (I personally use CoComment to keep track of comments.)

Feedburner’s Feedsmith
– Very handy indeed. I have used Feedburner instead of the default Blogger feed for a while. I created another Feedburner feed for this blog. The plugin helps you set it up within WordPress. Through the Blogger Dashboard I was able to divert the feed from the Blogger blog to this blog’s feed. Anyone currently subscribing to my old feed will now get the new feed instead.

Related Posts by Wasabi

- I am going to find this really useful especially while writing this series on WordPress.

Handy but not vital plugins:

Auto-Social – as I use del.icio.us as my main bookmarking service this is handy. All posts are automatically submitted to del.icious. All you need to do is point the plugin in the direction of your del.icio.us account.

Previous Posts Picker Allows you to see previous posts, related to the one you are writing, in the post editing window to make adding links to your post easier.

In Series – Adds a set of controls to the post editing window that lets you create a series of posts without having manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post.

Plugins useful for this blog:

Plugins Used – Displays what plug ins are being used on a blog. I thought this may be useful for you. You can view the page which lists the plugins I have installed and enabled from the Pages menu currently residing in the right sidebar.

Code Auto Escape – to allow me to easily display html and css code in posts. This will be useful when I start talking about designing themes.

To maybe add later:

More spam protection Recaptcha , Did you Pass Math or similar annoying feature those leaving comments have to fill in.

Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter to help discourage content thieves

I will cover some of these plugins in more detail later but in the meantime documentation is available via the download site and sometimes within the downloaded plugin folder itself.

If you want to browse for other plugins take a look at WordPress.org plugin directory. There are other directories but this one can keep you amused for hours (you may not use the term amused in this context!)

WordPress.org plugins documentation – explains how to install, activate and maage plugins.

I have run out of steam now and will add more later. (I am also heading out soon to meet people at a restaurant with the wonderful name of Wagamama’s)

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