Christmas is a time for saying thank you, so I’d like to say just that to the people who make the WordPress Plug-ins available for use that make this site what it is.
This is the list of plug-ins I’m currently using on this site:
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
I use this to add the various icons for sharing onto the bottom of posts and in the sidebar.
It also provides some tracking analytics for people who use it.
By The AddThis Team – Visit plugin site
Akismet
The must-have plug-in for comment spam. I’m sure this site is like many that gets a regular intake.
It’s seldom wrong at picking out the rubbish.
By Automattic – Visit plugin site
All in One SEO Pack
My preferred Search Engine Optimisation tool. I’m not that fixated with SEO but as over 40% of the visitors to this site come via search it’s important enough to care about.
By Michael Torbert - Visit plugin site
DandyID Services
I do more than blog – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. all feature in my online experience. DandyID is a great tool for creating an single point of reference for all of my presences. This plug-in makes all of those presences visible on this site.
By Neil Simon, Sara Czyzewicz, Arron Kallenberg, Dan Perron, Anthony Dimitre - Visit plugin site
FD Feedburner Plugin
I use Feedburner (now Google product) to provide the best possible feed to people that I can. Feedburner did seem to be in a bit of hiatus, but it seems to be picking up now.
This little plug-in redirects everyone to Feedburner for me, it’s one of those that you install and forget about.
It also provides another point for analytics, something that you’re never short of in the blogging world I find.
By John Watson | Visit plugin site
Flickr Photo Album
I am a big fan of Flickr and like to show off my photos on this site too. This plug-in makes everything I put onto Flickr available here too.
By Joe Tan – Visit plugin site
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics gives great insights into the what, where, who of a site. This plug-in sends all of the data from this site over to them.
By Joost de Valk – Visit plugin site
Google XML Sitemaps
Another way of making sure that you get visitors from search engines is to give them a good sitemap in the standard XML format. This plug-in creates a sitemap for me, again another set and forget plug-in.
By Arne Brachhold – Visit plugin site
MaxBlogPress Favicon
The natty little icon that you get in the browser for this site comes via this plug-in. It does a really simple thing, that’s nearly as easily done by copying a file to the right place. This is just that little bit easier.
By MaxBlogPress – Visit plugin site
Post-Plugin Library
This is a plug-in library used by a couple of the other plug-ins.
By Rob Marsh, SJ – Visit plugin site
Recent Comments
I like to show the recent comments in the sidebar. This plug-in gets them for me.
By Nick Momrik – Visit plugin site
Secure WordPress
Security is a big thing for a site that’s out there in the scary world of the internet. This is one of a couple of security plug-ins that I use, as well as some manual hardening of the site.
By jremillard – Visit plugin site
WordPress.com Stats
I’m a bit of an analytics and statistics junky. The WordPress.com stats are great to see in your dashboard. They also provide some things in a better way than Google Analytics
By Automattic – Visit plugin site
WP Security Scan
Another security tool that I use to keep this site nice and secure. I use more than one because they secure different things
By Michael Torbert – Visit plugin site
WP Super Cache
Assuming that one day this site gets inundated by a referral from a much bigger site and the traffic starts to spike this plug-in ensures that people read a cached copy of the information rather than read it out of the database each time. t’s never actually happened to me, but I’m being prepared.
By Donncha O Caoimh – Visit plugin site
Thank you everyone.
I’m using a number of the common plug-ins and all seem to be OK so far. These are the ones I’m running across the sites that I’ve updated:
