Everybody lies

As everybody who uses WordPress knows, there are lots of plugins available to extend the functions of your blog. Not only the “official” ones that are mentioned on the WP Extend page, but also loads of others elsewhere.

There are also lots of lists that try to showcase what all is possible, and help you with the decision which ones could be the most useful for you. Lorelle has got a nice list of lists, so to speak, that contains several hundred different plugins.

I myself am in no way expert enough to recommend plugins, but I can tell you that I tried quite a few, and here is what works for me:

1. Akismet

I wouldn’t wanna live without Akismet, which for me is just plain the most ingenious way to fight spam comments on a blog. I don’t know how exactly they are doing it, but it works like a charm. There is only the very occasional one that slips through, but I can live with that.

2. What Others Are Saying

This fantastic plugin by Sarah from stuffbysarah.net can be seen at work in my sidebar (you will probably have to scroll down a bit). It displays the latest post from blogs that are in my blogroll. So, once you’re finished reading my blog, go and have a look at what my blogging friends have to say.

3. DoFollow

This one switches off the “nofollow” attribute in comments, because nofollow doesn’t work against comment spam anyway (and it doesn’t have to, if you got Akismet). So I figured I might as well give out some link love to my commenters.

In case you missed the whole dofollow movement, go to Randa Clay and read up on it - and then join us and we will take over the blogosphere. Or whatever.

4. FeedBurner FeedSmith

This is one of those plugins that work in the background and are not visible to the readers of a blog. Basically it allows me, through the integration of Feedburner, to track the number of subscribers to my RSS feed.

5. Google Analytics

Same thing here. I used to use StatCounter to keep track of my website’s statistics, but I changed over to Google Analytics, because it just gives me more data. (Well, it would give me more data, if I had more visitors.) That said, I haven’t checked my stats for ages, so who knows how many readers I have meanwhile?

6. Random Quotes (wp_quotes)

This plugin is another one that adds a little fun to my sidebar. I used to have this little widget with quotes from my favorite t.v. show in the sidebar:

I really loved that, but since it’s a graphic it was un-customizable and turned out to be too wide for my sidebar. So I found this plugin to keep the quotes and now I find myself adding non-t.v.-related ones as well, just for the hell of it. But I assume this whole thing is more an amusement for myself than anybody else. Then again, it’s my blog. *shrug*

7. SRG Clean Archives

This is one of the more universally useful plugins again. It adds a very nicely structured monthly archive page to your blog. You can expand or collapse every month to see or hide the single posts. It looks clean and you never have to think about your archives again. Perfect for me.

8. Subscribe to Comments

This one does exactly what it says: it lets you subscribe to the comments of single posts. So, if there is a lively discussion going on (which, admittedly is rarely the case on my blog), you won’t miss any comments following your own one without having to check back regularly. Instead you get them delivered right into your mailbox.

9. WP Database Backup

Wouldn’t wanna live without that one either. I don’t do regular backup like I should, but with this plugin at least I mostly do a quick backup before I fiddle around with something - which has saved my blog a couple of times already when I botched it once again. It is certainly faster and less hassle than signing into PHPMyAdmin every time.

10. Comment Timeout

This one is pretty new to me - I just installed it a few days ago, so can’t really say how well it works.

It closes comments on older posts automatically. You can customize the number of days before comments get closed on a post, also you can leave comments for more popular posts open for a longer period of time. And if somebody comments on an old post you can let this comment go to your moderation queue - so an occasional real comment doesn’t get lost, whereas the comment spam (that often targets older posts) doesn’t get through.

11. Enhanced WP ContactForm

What this plugin does is that. It gives you a nice and clean contact form so your readers can send you messages or questions without you having to publish your email-address for the spam bots to find.

12. Comment Email Responder

This plugin I found through Grace from Sandier Pastures (I always seem to get the good stuff from you). I had a few problems at first to get it to work, because it was clashing with another plugin I had then (sorry, forgot which one). But after I deleted the other one, it works fantastic.

It emails the commenter when an admin replies to the comment, if the commenter is not subscribed to email updates via Subscribe-to-Comment. But not only does the commenter get your answer in an email (which is something Better Comments Manager for instance does as well), the answer also shows up in your comment section. Definitely saves a lot of work when you want to answer several comments at once.

13. Adhesive

This last one is a plugin that sounds fantastic: apparently it lets you make posts “sticky” - so that they stay at the top of the first page for however long you want.

In theory this sounds great, unfortunately in reality it doesn’t work for me. Not only does it mess up my blog a little (the navigation at the bottom of the pages vanishes when it is activated), I also don’t find a way to actually make a post sticky in my admin panel. It’s probably a version conflict, I read it worked alright in older WP versions. From the look of the author’s page it doesn’t look like he’s gonna update it anytime soon, though. Or ever.

Luckily there seems to be another plugin that is a modified version of Adhesive: WP-Sticky (you have to scroll down to no. 14 on the list). I’ll try that one next.

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So much for my list. Which plugins are you a fan of?