Favorite Plugins
No WordPress installation is complete without those excellent plugins. Plugins take WordPress to the next level. Right from search engine optimization to template tweaking, you have a one touch plugin for that. Other than the plugins that come with a default WordPress installation, here are the plugins which I can’t live without.
Adsense Deluxe
Anyone who wishes to integrate Adsense or any other ads to their blog must install this script. It makes the job much easier. You can maintain separate blocks of ad from the Adsense Deluxe backend and the best part is you can switch off which ever ads you want without editing template or post.
Google Sitemap Generator
As a webmaster, you can never ignore Google. If your site is banned by Google, you are in trouble. Let’s not get to that. What this plugin does is it generates a whole XML sitemap for your site dynamically i.e. every time your site gets updated. And if you upload your sitemap to Google Webmasters Tool, rest assured you will be in Google’s Index within 72 hours.
Share This
It is a well know fact that submitting your articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit etc.. brings good traffic and has a great impact on your page rank too. It will be better if your visitors themselves submit your articles to these sites. But they need a motivation to do that, don’t they? Come on, who would want to visit each and every bookmark site, type in your URL, Title, Description and submit? Most people would be lazy to even think of that. Thanks to Alex King, we have Share This plugin. Once activated, you will notice a “share this” button under every post. Clicking on it will bring a layer on to the page with submission links to most commonly used bookmarking sites. Clicking on these links will take you to a page where all vital info like URL, Title etc will be pre-filled by the plugin itself. Pretty nice, isn’t it?
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Tags are most important for a blogger. Blogging specific engines like Technorati, Icerocket etc.. utilises tags to a great extend. So the better tags you have, the better your position in blog search engines will be. Ultimate Tag Warrior can just do that. All you need to do is, after saving your post, click on the “Get Keyword Suggestions From Yahoo” button located under the tags input box. And in no time you will see a set of tags made out of your content right below the input box. Click on each tag to add it to your post. Very easy to use.
WP-Cache
When we first start our own hosted blog, most of us will be using shared hosting. The reason is it is very cheap and offers full value for money. But the truth is these shared hosts assume we will never reach the bottle neck. But what if we actually do? Suddenly one day we get a surge in traffic and soon our site gets suspended by our host - the reason, you used too much “resources”. These resources are basically the mysql database part as the other factor, which is bandwidth will be always available in plenty. To avoid this situation, we need to cache our pages so that most of the time our pages remain static unless there is some change in the content. WP-Cache can do that and is fully automatic too. From what I know, nowadays hosts like Dreamhost actually recommend users to install WP-Cache first, if you are planning to host WordPress.