www.James-Strocel.com

Since the Wordcamp last week I’ve been hard at work trying to trick out my blog for the internet at large. This involved locating and installing a lot of plug-ins. I’ve decided to save everyone else some time and post 20 of the most useful plug-ins I’ve found on the net.

Adsense-Deluxe - helps distribute google ads around my blog. It’s part of my quixotic quest to make this thing turn a profit.

Akismet - It’s no surprise this plug-in becomes bundled with wordpress now. If it weren’t for this one the comments section would be drowning in cialis ads.

All in One SEO pack - allows you to give your posts relevant search engine terms so google will pick it up.

Brian’s Threaded Comments - allows users to reply directly to other users’ posts.

Digg This - If anyone ever decides to submit one of my posts to the social news site Digg.com (hint, hint) this plug-in will alert my blog and stick a Digg button up at the top there.

Extended Comment Options - Another weapon in the war on comment spam. This plug-in allows you to control comment access over all of your posts.

Feedburner Feedsmith - If you want to switch over to using Feedburner, this is the plug-in to get. It forwards subscribers of your old RSS feed to your new and shiny Feedburner RSS feed.

Google Analytics for Wordpress - It’s kind of tough to use Google Analytics on Wordpress because all the pages are dynamically generated. This plug-in puts the Analytics code on all the necessary parts of your page.

Google XML Sitemaps - Google keeps track of websites using XML sitemaps. With this plug-in, you can generate a Sitemap and regenerate it when your page updates, making it more visible to Google.

Livejournal Crossposter - If you have friends on livejournal, then this plug-in will scrape your post and put it on your livejournal account.

PHPlist - Integrates with the PHPlist application to create a mailing list for your blog.

Show Top Commentators - Gives bragging writes to the users who comment the most on your blog.

Simple Tags - While not quite as simple as the name suggests, it allows you to mass edit the tags on your posts.

Socialize - This will allow you to try out the Digg This plug-in. At the bottom of the post there are a number of buttons so that anyone can submit an article to Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, or any other social news site.

Subscribe to Comments - Users can catch up on responses to their posts with this handy plug-in.

Twitter Tools - Using this, you can put new post notifications on Twitter or write Twitter posts from wordpress.

Twitter Widget - Puts that twitter feed right on the sidebar.

Widgetize Anything - Not every Wordpress plug-in is optimized for sidebar widgets. This plug-in hopes to change that.

Wordpress.com Stats - Puts usage statistics on the dashboard of your blog.

Wordpress Database Backup - Nothing protects you from catastrophic failure like the occasional database backup. This plug-in does it quickly and easily.