Working at Home on the Internet

WordPress Plug-ins I Use

I know there are zillions of Plug-ins out there for WordPress Blogs. My problem has always been finding the useful ones to do tasks I feel I need to accomplish, in the easiest manner, and save some time. To that end, I thought I would share the Plug-ins I use to help save you having to look all over for some of the more useful Plug-ins.

These are not in any particular order of importance because each one does something unique.

Akismet… They check your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service (it’s free). The only real problem I ever had with Akismet is when it ATE MY COMMENTS and it considered ME SPAM (they did fix it after some prodding). Other than that, it has saved me from almost 13,000 Spam Comments so far. What’s a little aggrevation for such a great service.

bdp-comments… It lists recent comments and posts for display in the sidebar. I am only using it for recent reader remarks at this point. With this, readers can see what conversation is going on, who’s there and what post the comments are on so they can join right in.

FD Feedburner Plugin… This is suposed to convert all RSS feeds into FeedBurner feeds for easy tracking of subscribers. I installed this last week and haven’t seen any real changes in stats. Maybe it only changes New Feeds? The jury is still out on this one.

Filosofo Uncheck Default Category… I am really glad that I found this one. It takes one of the most annoying aspects of using categories in WordPress, having to uncheck the default of Uncategorized, and Unchecks it automatically when you click a different category. Only saves 2 seconds per post, but it’s well worth installing.

In Series… Provides navigation controls for next/previous within a connected series of posts. It’s fairly easy to install and use if you do any ongoing series of posts. I never got the next/previous within the series right, but I didn’t go through all the steps of installing all of the code. It’s on the to-do list to finish, although it works fine the way I have it.

SimpleTags… This allows for the insertion of Technorati Tags within posts. Very easy install, just a little code in the post to make it work. I don’t know why it took so long to find, but you can take it with you if you want to use tags for T-rati.

Subscribe To Comments… This makes it easy to allow readers to follow conversations in comments on your blog. All they have to do is check the little box, and they will be notified of any new comments by email.

WordPress Database Backup… I don’t have to tell you how important backing up your information is. This makes backing up your WP database easy.

WP-ContactForm… When I was having tons of spam coming in through the Blog, I went on a quest to find something to alleviate the problem. This is easy to install and easy to use for your readers. And it does help keep the spam down a bit from blog email.

wp-notable… If you want to include some of the more notable Social Bookmarks like Digg, deli-o-cious, etc to your posts, this will give you choices of which ones you want to include and even show the icon for each site.

There you have it, the Plug-ins I have and use to make my day a little easier. Whether you Work at Home or just Blog for Fun, you may want to try a couple of these out for yourself.

Have you found any WP Plug-ins that make your day a little easier? Want to share?

Related Posts:

Save 10 Seconds per Post

Fighting Spam: One Step at a Time

Installing the In-Series Plug-in

Basic Tools I Use

Technorati Tags: WordPress, Plugins, Filosofo, In Series, Akismet, Simple Tags, bdp comments, WP ContactForm, wp-notable, Subscribe to Comments, FD Feedburner Plugin

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January 16th, 2007 at 06:03am | Posted by Joe | Akismet, Plug-ins, Resources, Tools, WordPress | 3 reader remarks | Print This Post