Interactive Llama

If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins.

Anti-Spam Plugins

Math Comment Spam Protection

This plugin asks an additional question after a commentors name and email to prove that the commentor is human and not a comment spam bot. I currently have my websites set up to say “Enter numeral for the sum of two and nine. (e.g. 10).” There many other types of capcha’s but this is my favorite since, it doesn’t involve titlting your head sideways and reading backwards!

Simple Trackback Validation

This plugin scans any page that tries to add a trackback to your blog. If the link to your website does not exist, the trackback link is ignored. With modern blogs using pingbacks instead of trackbacks, you may want to disable trackbacks completely.

Category/Tag Plugins

Simple Tags

This plugin allows mass-editing of tags, and it can remove unused tags.

Batch Categories

With the advent of tags, many bloggers do not categorize their posts as strictly as they used to. This plugin allows mass-editing of categories. If you have many categories and need to move posts between categories, use this plugin.

Additional Content Plugins

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This plugin creates a sitemap for users (not a XML sitemap for search engines) that lists all posts and pages by category. You can use multiple pages, but I prefer only one page.

Popularity Contes

This plugin is great for listing the “most touched” posts. By “most touched,” I mean that views, RSS views, commenting and more statistics are used and weighted to decided which posts are most popular. It’s half science, half meta-science, since items on your home page will be viewed more than items that aren’t on your home page.

FeedList
You can create your own feed reader with the classes and code that come with WordPress (function wp_rss). This plug-in just makes it easier. I use FeedList to place my RSS feed from Twitter on all my sites and to place a list of the books I am now reading in the footer of my blogs.

WP Related Posts
This plugin lists posts that have the same tags as the current post. It suggests to readers other posts they might be interested in.

Sideblog Wordpress Plugin
This plugin allows you highlight a post category to always be in the sidebar (for example, Tweets via Twitter Tools if you do not want to use Twitter Tool’s widget). This plug-in is used in the sidebar of RachelandStephen.

Twitter Tools
It took me a while to “get” Twitter. For me, Twitter is a subscription-based public chatroom. You pick who you want to interrupt your day. As someone who doesn’t post to his blogs that frequently, Twitter allows me to keep my website fresh with micro-blogging. This plug-in is used with SideBlog in the sidebar of RachelandStephen. I have a tutorial on how I prefer to use Twitter Tools in my sidebar.