my favorite plugins

Image via Wikipedia

You can ignore this post as administrivia if you don’t care about WordPress plugins. This post is partly for myself and partly to pass the word about some plugins that I use and find useful for my site.

Broken Link Checker - This little tool does just what its name says.  The results show up on my dashboard. If any broken links are found, this plugin tells me what the URL is and what page it’s on.  I can update the URL, unlink it, or tell the plugin that the link isn’t really broken, all right from my dashboard.

CommentLuv - I saw this plugin at work on Inspired to Action and loved it immediately.  When your visitors leave comments for you, they can choose to have it add a link back to their most recent post.

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin – Hands down, one of my two favorite plugins. Akismet does what it does, but I still have to wade through spam and delete it.  I don’t even want to see the stuff.  Very simply, if you’re a real person, you just click a box.  No more annoying captcha or challenge questions.  Just a simple little ticky box.

NoSpamNX – The second of my two favorite plugins.  Between Growmap and NoSpamNX, I don’t see any more comment spam. This handy plugin adds an invisitble field to my comment form that only spambots see.  If the field gets filled in, then the comment is marked as spam.

StatCounter – I’ve been using StatCounter for years before I moved to WordPress, so I was thrilled when I saw that they have their own plugin.  The free version only logs your last 500 hits, but I love the way they summarize your stats in a way that’s easy to understand. My favorite is the Visitor Paths report: it shows me where my visitors are from, what sites referred them (if any), and where they go when they visit my site.

Related Posts Thumbnails – I like having related posts linked to one another, but I don’t always remember to pick them out. This plugin picks some out for me based on tags, categories, or both.  It also includes a pretty thumbnail if there’s an image in the post, which encourages me to add more images.

SABRE – Another anti-spam plugin, this one stops spam registrations.

Snow, balloons and more – This is just for fun.  It adds snow or balloons or whatever to your site.

Twitter Tools – This is where my twitterday posts come from.  I probably don’t use Twitter the way I’m “supposed” to.  One of the things I do use it for though, is to bookmark pages I want to come back to.  Being able to publish a weekly roundup of my tweets lets me archive those bookmarks too.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade – This is pretty much what the title says.  I don’t have to look everything up every time there’s a WordPress upgrade anymore.  I don’t have to figure out what to download.  I just get a message saying it’s time to upgrade, then I let this plugin do all the work.

WordPress Editorial Calendar – A visual way to schedule your posts.  Allows you to drag and drop posts and edit them right in the calendar.

WP Social Blogroll – Just like CommentLuv, when I saw a social blogroll on Percolated Paradox, I had to have one of my own. It’s not the same plugin Campbell uses, but it does the job.  It also gives me the option of having a blogroll page.  This plugin reads the blogfeed and shows the latest posts from your blogroll sites.

Zemanta – I actually haven’t decided whether or not I like this plugin yet.  But I love the idea of it, and I’m using it for my bunny prompts.  It reads your post and suggests links and free-to-use images to go along with it.  If you can find an image you like, you just drag it into your post and Zemanta does everything for you.  Finding images I like has been hit or miss though.  However, if you start with a blank post, Zemanta gives you the option to “inspire me” – then it suggests random images and links.  This is where my bunny prompts are coming from.