A Pretty Simple blog

Inspired by Jack Pickard’s own list, here’s a list of the WordPress plugins I currently use.

I’ll update it if/when I install more, and if you have any suggestions do leave a comment.

Akismet

Obviously. Am also on the look out for other plugins to help in the battle against spam. Suggestions? Jack recommends Spam Karma 2 so I’m going to check that out.

Bad Behaviour

Denies automated spambots access to your site. I’ve only just installed this so time will tell whether it has any impact on the amount of spam I get.

Dean’s Permalink Migration

A very useful plugin, this. When I started blogging, the URLs of my posts where just a random string of numbers (e.g. http://www.prettysimple.co.uk/blog/?p=568). Not very user friendly. So eventually I decided to use meaningful permalinks. Trouble is, if you simply change the format of your blog’s permalinks, all of your previous URLs (as linked to from other blogs, Tweets, webpages etc) will no longer work. This plugin lets you migrate to a new permalink format whilst preserving the old URLs via 301 redirects.

Sociable

A handy plugin for offering social bookmarking links at the end of your posts (see the end of this one for an example). You can pick and choose from over 60 sites (Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook etc), and Sociable then serves up small icons to allow users to quickly and easily share your post.

Twitter for WordPress

Nice and simple plugin for displaying your latest Tweets on your blog. It detects URLs and @usernames and serves these up as hyperlinks which is nice (I’ve seen some plugins that don’t offer this). Jack recommends Twitter Tools so I’ll probably look at that one soon as well.

Ultimate Google Analytics

Automatically inserts your GA tracking code into posts, making it a doddle to collect stats.

WordPress Database Backup

Automates the backup process and can even email you the backup file periodically (from every week to every hour). Great for peace of mind!

Related links

• WordPress Plugin Directory
• 10 most downloaded WordPress plugins of all time (apparently)
• 17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential – Smashing Apps
• Also see Gary’s (of the Dog’s Blog) list of plugins and widgets for more ideas

Tags: analytics, blogs, links, Plugins, social networking, Spam, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.