A Path Less Taken

WordPress is a great blogging platform, but out of the box there are many neat things that it does not do. Enter WordPress Plugins to close the functionality gap and make for happy users. This list is a revisiting of my favorite WordPress plugins. All of those listed are ones that I take advantage of on my blog. Here is the short and sweet list.

• Akismet – A spam blocker that traps comment spam and traceback spam before it gets published to your blog.
• Bad Behavior – A link spam blocker. I run both Bad Behavior and Akismet because I despise link spam bots.
• Browser Detection – This plugin was created by me to do simple browser detection. The code was mainly taken from the web, but I have been unsuccessful thus far at finding the original author or site so I could provide proper credit.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin updates major search engines to new entries on your blog. If you are ready to get serious about SEO this is the tool to start with.
• Graceful Pull-Quotes – Pull Quotes are a great way to add professional polish to your blog. This plugin is super easy to use to get your pull-quotes going.
• SexyBookmarks – My newest plugin addition. Sexy Bookmarks allows you to easily add Social Bookmarking Icons to each post.
• WP-Syntax – Powerful syntax highlighting using GeSHi.

Although that’s all the plugins I use, there are hundreds of useful plugins available for you to try. If you are still interested in other great plugins you should read the blog post 20 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Every Website by Amber Weinberg. This is a pretty good list to give you an idea of the amazing variety of plugins available for WordPress

Enjoy