12 Essential Wordpress Plugins
If you’re like me, you’ve decided to write a blog to share your writing with the world. You thought your writing would stand on its own, and readers would flock to your website, grateful that you decided to share your awesomeness with everyone.
Then, reality sets in. Developing content and working on your “Real” writing become chores, not fun.
Even worse, you realize that although you’ve trained yourself to develop plots and realistic characters, to edit yourself and set realistic goals, you know bupkis about SEO, CMS, WEB 2.0 and all the other things you thought you could get away with not knowing. After all, this blogging is supposed to be all about giving the masses a voice, right?
Tough. Like anything else, like writing, blogging has it’s own learning curve. Sure, wordPress is easy and powerful. But I collect Plugins the way I used to collect Lovecraft. Some help, some take up space, and some are useless. So here’s a list of the plugins I use on various websites and Why:
Akismet- The spam Blocker that’s included with Wordpress is still one of the best. You should have already enabled it. if not, shame on you.
Bad Behavior- The other Spam Blocker. Bad Behavior maintains a list of bad sites and blocks these users from ever seeing your precious posts.
All-In-One-SEO- Allows you to ad meta data to your posts to get them noticed by Google.
Democracy Poll- The easiest way to add Interactivity. And that’s a good thing.
Google Sitemaps- Helps Google Index all your pages. ANd if it helps Google, it helps you.
MicroKid’s Related Posts- Lets you search your posts and manually add related posts to posts. Posts. Posts Posts. ( Not Spam)
Popularity Contest- Alex King has written a whole mess of popular, useful plugins, but this is really useful. It allows you to rank pages and posts on a variety of criteria.
RSS-Footer- Ads a footer with a link back to your site to your RSS feed.
Sociable- Adds Social bookmarking buttons to your posts, making it easier for readers to share and recommend your pages. Try it now!
wp-Cache- Reduces Server load and speeds up page rendering by creating static pages of your posts. That’s technobabble for pleases your readers if you get a bunch all at once.
wp-Database Manager- Lets you update and manage your database from the dashboard. Great for Piece of mind.
WWSGD- What Would Seth Godin Do? Ask readers to subscribe a couple of times, then quietly disappear.
Bonus: 4 Firefox Extensions for writers
scribefire- Lets write blog entries and add site reviews from Firefox without having to fire up the old Dashboard.
Logos- Dictionary, quotes and more
FireFtp- Full Features FTP for managing your Wordpress Install, themes and Plugins.
Tree Style Tabs- Puts Browser tabs down the left side of your browser and lets you organize them like bookmarks
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
[...] here to subscribe to our RSS if you value what little sanity you have left!Earlier I gave a list of essential WordPress Plugins that I use on my websites. But what About Plugins Specific to the needs of the Professional Writer [...]