WordPress plug-ins my blog cannot exist without
I have been looking at ever growing list of plug-ins in my blog Dashboard. Honestly, there are several which are not even active, couple which doesn’t seem to work with my theme (?), and probably few I have no idea why they are there and what they do, but they probably are important (or not?).
I thought that while at it, I will compile a list of them as a post, explaining why I have and what they do. Maybe you can pick something useful for your blog. I am not sure how to asses importance of some of the plug-ins, so I went with alphabetic list.
Akismet and Mollom – my janitors. This plug-in filters out spam from the comments my posts receive.
All in One SEO – I installed the plug-in out of curiosity when I read about it in this blog post. Search Engine Optimizations is very trendy nowadays, but if you don’t want to spend time understanding what all the fuss is about, the same post gives you example of most basic settings to use.
Better Cloud Tag – displays the list of most popular keywords from my posts, adjusting the font size to popularity. I think it is more useful then plain list, and at the same time is not as irritating as those moving clouds.
Broken Link Checker – goes through all the links in the blog posts, even links to other posts within my site, and alerts me when the page cannot be find. I find it especially useful when I move for example galleries and other sub-pages around the site.
ExZo – certainly one of my favorites. It lets me display the Exif data from each image – you can see what my camera settings were for each picture. Side note- doesn’t work with iPhone images :(.
FeedBurner FeedSmith – counts how many people subscribe to my blog. Adding the number to what Google Analytics shows (below), and I know how many people read what I write. Keeps me motivated ;).
Google Analyticator – it is a cool tool, as it not only follows my site stats, but also adds a widget right to my Dashboard. I can check how many people visited my blog in last months and which posts were popular whenever I enter my admin panel.
Lightbox 2 – is a special plug-in for blog readers, or more – watchers. It let’s you to see image separated from the blog post on a dark background, when you click on it.
PictPocket – a very useful plug-in. It alerts me when somebody hot-links my images. Most of the time, these are search engines, like Google, but sometimes people hot-link my images on their blogs, and although I check the site each time, more often then not I will block this additional traffic.
PollDaddy polls – lets me create and embed the polls in the posts.
Wordbooker – recent addition, to automate posting the new blog content on the Facebook page to increase blog exposure.
WPtouch iPhone theme – I installed it after reading a Twitter discussion prompted by Scott Bourne (@ScottBourne) asking about best plug-in to adjust blog display on mobile devices. Works well for me, too. And was something I simply haven’t thought about previosly.
YD Zoomify – special plug-in working with Zoomify software to display panoramas in a cool, browsing way like here.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – I guess the name says it all, but finding the plug-in working to my expectations was a big pain. I finally asked around, and got this one recommended by Jeff Revell (@photowalkpro).
OK, that’s it. If you made it that far in all technical and maybe even boring details, something more fun. A poll. And a chance to introduce yourself.
If your answer is yes, please leave a comment with link and a short description of your blog, so me and other readers can go and check it out!