VirusHead

I’ve been playing with a variety of plugins for WordPress. I’ll be nice and not list the plugins that I don’t like. These are the new plugins that I’m actually using:

• The most useful one is Google Sitemaps (Arne Brachhold). It creates an automatically-updating Google-compliant sitemap of your blog with a built-in configuration page for your administration panel. Excellent!
• The WordPress Akismet comment spam filter works really well, but I wanted something at the gate too. Even scanning the hundreds of daily attempted posts was depressing. Peter Keung’s Custom Anti-Spam plugin is a simple word image generator that has stopped the spambots cold, at least for now. The image isn’t very difficult to read, unlike some, and you can customize the pool of words to display – which is kind of fun. And of course, I’ve still got Akismet for backup if that fails.
• I am very fond of the Kill Preview plugin (Owen Winkler). It seemed a simple thing, but there seemed to be no way to turn off the preview when you’re writing a post. This did the trick.
• Mullet (Jonathan Broom) produces the “long-tail” listing of post titles at the bottom of the page. It lists only posts that aren’t already on the page – much better than just having the “Previous” link – and you have to love it just for the name.
• Sociable (Peter Harkins) automatically adds links to popular “social bookmarking” sites. Mine doesn’t have Technorati listed yet, but it looks like it will be added soon. You can change the configuration to include as many (or as few) as you want. Hover with the mouse if you’re not familiar with the icons. It’s such a viral thing that I can’t resist. I have it on the single post pages, so you’ll see it if you look at comments, but I decided not to have it on the regular blog home page. That would be a little too much, I think.
• I have installed and tested, but not actually started using, Anthony Girasoli‘s Get Recent Posts plugin. It lists the most recent posts, by content or excerpt, but for only one specific catagory. I’m thinking about using it to make a dedicated page for the JW posts.

There are some other plugins that I’ve already been using, of course. Here are my faves:

• Recent Comments List (Jared Bangs) is on my sidebar. It lists recent comments in descending order, arranged by post title. It shows the name of the commenter, and links to the comment.
• One year ago (Borja Fernandez) shows titles of your posts from… um… one year ago, although you can change it to X years or posts ago.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior (Christine Davis) is what I’m using for the tags at the end of each post, as well as the tag cloud at the bottom of the page. It has a lot of options, and I like it, but I still haven’t figured out how to make a tags page that would list all the linked tags.
• WP-Amazon (Rich Manalang) makes it easy to search for and add items from Amazon to my posts. I do that occasionally, sometimes more for the image than anything else. Configure it with your Amazon associates id. Who knows? You might earn yourself a free book or two.
• WordPress Database Backup (Scott Merrill) is a convenient way to backup the blog and download it. I’m not entirely comfortable with database administration, and this gives me peace of mind.

Comments? Criticisms? Suggestions?