The WordPress plugins I use – and recommend
As I have promised one of my friends, here I list the WordPress plugins I am using and what I think of them:
- AdSense-Deluxe: If you are an AdSense user and frequently want to insert Google Ads within your post, WordPress editor by it self can get annoying in the way it manipulates certain scripts within the post. This plugin helps you organize the library of Ads you use and include them in your post with simple <!–keyword–> way.
- Anarchy Media Player: To allow easy embedding of videos inside your post. I still find problem with it however. I tried many solutions and figured the best way with my current WordPress release is to copy/paste embedded code from say YouTube and save at once. Any edit will require I remodify the code to be on a single line again. This problem does not seem to exist with WordPress 2.2 which is used to power my Daily Gizmos blog. However the list of not-supported plugins there is huge so the migration is not a walk in the park.
- Challenge: The protector of the universe.. Arr I mean my blog. It does not completely stop spam though, spammers still find their way through, but without it I get like 50 spam comments per hour.
- DoFollow: This is controversy. Google is completely against it. DoFollow removes the NoFollow from your commenter’s backlink. Meaning that the link will be counted by Google as a weighted link. The idea is that you did not chose to actually link to people who comment on your blog, i.e., it doesn’t actually reflect you were referring to them. It’s them posting, and many times just for the sake of backlink, that is true. So Google believes those links should not interfere with the site ranking weight. Others like Yahoo however don’t believe in this method and count all links, disregarding NoFollow attribute. I am having a second thought about it, but this is the issue of another article I will discuss it in detail later.
- FeedBurner Feed Replacement (Now called FeedSmith): This is a wonderful plugin. FeedBurner first of all is a site that will help you monitor and optimize your blog feeds. To do so however you have to map your feeds to them. This plugin does it in one click. Unfortunately this plugin is not WP 2.2 supported yet.
- Feed Footer: I am just trying out this plugin, and if you are reading my post through Feed Reader you should see a small Sponsored Ad at the end of the post. Many people (like me) like to read posts through RSS Reader as it’s much more practical. This however forbids blog owner privilege of delivering ads, unless they post incomplete RSS Feeds, which I hate to do. This plugin lets you make your readers happy while still get a chance to make some income.
- Google (XML) Sitemap: Sitemaps are easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that are available for crawling. For a normal site, this is possible manually. However with a blog, every day you are supposed to add a new page. So keeping up the Sitemap.xml file updated all the time is a tedious job. This plugin does it for you. On every new post, edit, or delete, this plugin builds the new XML Sitemap. You can also adjust the pages priority from a user interface. All you have to do then is tell Search Engines about your sitemap for better indexing. Use Google Webmasters for starter.
- Popularity Contest: This you can see at the footer of my posts. The popularity rank of each post based on number of views from main page, singe post view, feed view, comments etc. You get to decide how each factor weights in the equation. Ofcourse old posts will not have their history reflected here, but on the long run it’s good to have. Note to make however some posts have somehow strange results, like one that had %100 popularity, I don’t know how. Nothing special about it, and it’s like saying you got %100 votes in election. Not possible if you’re not alone.
- Sphere Related Content Widget: I recently disabled it to go easy on my blog response time. It got loaded with stuff it needs serious attention now. This plugin gives the user list of related articles to your post. The links are shown in new sliding window on click only, making it user friendly
- Show Top Commentors: Reward top commenting people on your blog by listing them on your side menu. Also, this most probably means that they are eligible to have the NoFollow removed, which the plugin does by default.
- Subscribe To Comments: Keep your users tied to the post. Alert them of new post comments by email. Pretty straight forward and useful. I was surprised how often people use it.
- WordPress Database Backup: For the bad days! Mostly you can do that through your host console as well.
- WP-Amazon: This is the strongest AJAX plugin I came across. It allows you through side menu in editor mode to include Images and links to Amazon with your affiliate id in it. This thing should be sponsored by Amazon it’s much easier and faster than using Amazon Affiliate site it self. You search for your item and is fetched on the fly with you affiliate Id added to it. last time I checked, it was not WP 2.2 supported as well :(.
Wp-Cache: Some people have spoken great deal of this plugin, others and I have not see performance improvement of post caching. Either way, Do no come near this if you have Challenge plugin activated. I did so and ofcourse, the question got cached and displayed everytime, but the real answer is different. People couldn’t post anymore. Trying to remove did not seem so simple at all as well. Read my older post if you want more information on this.
If anyone’s got some comments on those, or further plugins to add, do share them please.
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Comments
I heard about it, but it needs WordPress user right? Is it good?
Even though, I like to track viagra prices. I buy low/sell high ;)
AdSence-Deluxe
very clever and time saving, I think I’ll appreciate it more if I acutally used AdSense (which I’m planning to)
Anarchy Media Player
Excellent Plug in for the YouTube blogger ..
Challenge
I think i’m gonna use this, in stead of not manually moderating the comments on my blog, i bet it doesn’t look good when someone posts a comment and not see it there right away, the blog will loose it’s interactivity and this challenge plug in can save it :)
DoFollow
I’m surprised that wordpress are adding this NoFollow Feature, i’m sure that it’s there to prevent spammers from scoring some points for their rankings but it’s being generalized for legitimate commenters and contributors too ..
this is very thoughtful and selfless of you, coz u took the time to add a plug in that your readers benefit from ..
FeedBurner
I’ve just heared that teir services are completely free now that they have been acquired by google ..
Subscribe To Comments
this is excellent for ppl who commented on some post and then they want to see the comments on their comments
Excellent post man, thanks a lot for sharing :)
Looking forward for your very own wordpress plug in ( a little greedy huh ;p )
A comment on Challenge. You can not use it to have spam free blog believe me your site will look so bad with Viagra and porn comments coming through. I think I will try the Spam Karma plugin it is much better.
As for my very own plugin, I just started thinking about it seriously last week. Now that I should have extra free time. I sacrificed a lot for that time and I better use it.
I use Spam Karma Plugin, to take care of the automated Spambots, which keep selling me Viagra :-)