Die-for plugins

Every of us, blog­gers, stands sooner or later (mostly sooner) in front of the Word­Press plu­gins dir­ect­ory, look­ing at the plu­gins names and descrip­tions with wide eyes, installing them one by one. But the major­ity of the fresh “toys” on your blog doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t work or doesn’t match one’s needs. In my dra­matic called art­icle I will intro­duce nec­cessary add-ons on your blog install­a­tions, which really each site should have. (Plus some hard–core–code tips).

Speed

WP Super Cache — The title says it. It caches the posts, so less SQL quer­ies are done. Site loads faster.

Com­ments

Sub­scribe to Com­ments — A reader leaves a com­ment: will he remem­ber to check for replies? Maybe he will check the post once or twice, but then he will give up. The plu­gin allows com­menters to sub­scribe to follow-up com­ments via e-mail notification.

Get Recent Com­ments — Not so nec­cessary, but use­ful for fast over­view of recent activ­ity on the blog.

Writ­ing

No Self Pings — You know that feel­ing: you link your pre­vi­ous post and get a bunch of false ping­backs? This plu­gin pre­vents that.

Sim­pleTags — Much, much bet­ter tag man­age­ment system.

Read­ing

WP-PageNavi - If you want to look for old posts, you’ll most likely need to click on “older posts” pretty a bunch of times. This plu­gins puts pagin­a­tion wherever you want. Can look amaz­ing with some styling.

Pro­mot­ing

WordTwit — Only for Twit­ter users. Tweets a link with option­ally text when you post a new article.

WP Greet Box — Asks social-network users for RSS sub­scrip­tion, Twit­ter fol­low­ship etc. Looks nice and is functional.

.htac­cess improvements

This art­icle is the best source for .htac­cess improve­ments. This is for advanced users only.

That’s pretty much everything “basic” that you need as a blog­ger. I hope I was help­ful. I always hope. Sorry for the RII picture.