Every WordPress blog uses at least one plugin to extend or enhance its functionality. TechTraction is no exception. Since I just finished a series of posts journaling the redesign of this site, I thought I should add one more relevant post and list all of the plugins I use on my site — just in case anyone wanted to know.

• Akismet: Prevents comment spam from entering your blog which it does very well. Comes with the standard WordPress install but you need to sign up with WordPress so you can get an activation key. Regardless of the popularity of your blog, this plugin is a “must have.”
• Dagon Design Sitmap Generator: Sitemaps have been a staple of web sites as far back as I can remember. This single page provides a hierarchical view of all the content on your site, and this plugin makes a very tedious task as easy as clicking a single button.
• DoFollow: Disable the default “rel=nofollow” setting in WordPress and give back a little “link love.” Whenever someone posts a comment and leaves their website URL, DoFollow allows that link to get counted as an incoming link for that web site. Giving back some “link love”, in my opinion, encourages readers to leave comments.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement: Allows you to forward all of your feed traffic to Feedburner. The big benefit I see from this plugin is that it makes it easy for readers to pick the feed reader they want to add your feed.
• Google Sitemaps: Different than a traditional sitemap.html file, this plugin creates a sitemap.xml file which enables Google to more efficiently crawl and index your site. I believe you need to sign up for a Google Webmaster account so you can tell Google about your site and the location of the sitemap.xml. Nevertheless, this plugin makes it very easy to create and automatically update your sitemap.xml for Google.
• Popularity Contest: This plugin, from Alex King, drives the “Most Popular Posts” subsection in my sidebar. Personally, I think presenting posts in this format offers your readers another unique way to find content on your site.
• Share This: Want to make it easy for readers to submit your posts to Digg and other popular social networking sites? This plugin, another one from Alex King, provides a very clean interface to some of the most popular social networking sites on the net today and also offers an “Email This to a Friend” option as well. Absolutely one of my most favorite plugins.
• Simple Tags: Allows you to turn keywords in your posts into Technorati tags. Some people don’t like how this allows people to leave your site with a simple click, but I like how I can control under what tags my posts appear on Technorati.
• Subscribe to Comments: I love this plugin because I think it adds big value to the readers. This plugin places a checkbox at the end of the comment thread allowing users to receive an email update each time someone posts a new comment to this particular discussion thread. I highly recommend this plugin to anyone looking to increase their site’s functionality for its readers. Another one of my most favorite plugins.
• WP-Cache: Available as part of the default WordPress installation. This plugin caches pages from your site making it faster and more responsive.

Plugins for WordPress abound, which helps to make it one of the most popular blogging platforms on the net today. If there is something you want to do with your blog that isn’t included in WordPress by default, more than likely a plugin already exists. Check out the WordPress directory of plugins to see what else is available. Also, if you’re interested in what plugins exist to help with placing advertisements on your site (critical if you want to make money with your blog), check out a great list at Fuzzy Future. I haven’t done anything with this type of plugin as of yet, but do plan to use Stark’s list when I finally get around to taking a closer look at this topic.

Please Note: Comments have been closed on this post. Thanks for visiting (01/02/2007)

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