Every time I set up a new site/blog using Wordpress I refer to my own little list of essential plugins – those tried and tested favourites that develop the basic platform by

• increasing functionality for the reader
• helping me to reach a wider audience
• optimising the performance of the site

I’ve tried out dozens of plugins at this stage for various things and below is my list. I have a further list of more specialised plugins I refer to depending on the scope of the project. Watch this space for a further post on those, but for now here’s my list of key plugins:

Essential

Akismet – the ultimate in spam blocking, Akismet prevents all those annoying garbled messages about viagra/porn/lottery-wins/link-exchanges from blocking up your comments.

WP Supercache - speeds up your blog immeasurably (well it probably is measurable actually), so when you make the front page of Digg your site won’t crash.

WordPress Database Backup – we’re all supposed to back up data regularly in case anything drastic should go wrong (which it often does). The same applies to your blog. This db back up plugin just takes the pain out of the process.

Readership

Contact Form 7 - you want people to be able to contact you, you need a simple form to capture the information and send it on to you – here you go.

Subscribe2 – like any author you want to increase your readership. Allowing people to subscribe to your posts by email is an essential way to do this. Subscribe2 is a simple and straightforward email subscription manager.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - RSS (or atom) is your friend – it brings you regular readers. I use feedburner, hence this plugin, but if you use atom there are other options.

TweetMeme Button – the ubiquitous little grey and green bubble telling you how many times a post has been tweeted and begging you to tweet it too – you’ve seen them, now you can have your own. (Go on hit mine below!).

Social Bookmarking RELOADED – so you’ve written a great post, the reader loves it, and they want to tell other people about it, or they would if they knew how.  Make it easy for them – offer them the option of Digging, stumbling or posting to facebook, or one of the dozens of options in this plugin. A word of warning though, choose your options wisely and sparingly, there’s nothing more annoying than millions of little hieroglyphics on the bottom of a page.

SEO

All in One SEO Pack - one of the most popular plugins ever – 3.5 million people can’t be wrong! Makes your blog optimisation a piece of cake.

Google XML Sitemaps - a key step in SEO is generating an xml sitemap that engines can access easily. This plugin creates a sitemap for use by all the major engines, updates it each time you post, and notifies the engines of those changes.

Robots Meta – help the engine bots out, give them signposts around your blog, stoppinh them from duplicating content, or indexing pages you don’t want indexed for search listings. (For a more tech-savvy explanation try wikipedia!)

Analytics

Google Analytics for Wordpress – monitoring your website traffic, tracking and responding to trends are key to developing a successful web presence. Google analytics is one of the most commonly used analytics programmes and this plugin helps you get it up, running and tracking with a couple of clicks of a mouse.

Wassup – I’m a sucker for real-time data, I want to know who’s online, where they came from, and what they are looking at – Wassup helps me to do just that. A bit addictive and can waste a lot of time, but like twitter, very useful when checked in moderation…

Handy

WP-polls – blogging, like all social media, is about interaction and the exchange of ideas, if you want to move beyond comments to a survey, questionaire or quiz, then this little baby is for you.

SlideShare - not for everyone, but I find for the sites I have set up, that allowing easy embedding of presentations via Slideshare saves a lot of hassle, and adds to visibility of the person/company’s work – another form of social media marketing/proliferation on the web.

A Word on Wordpress Plugin Etiquette

Wordpress plugins are free generally speaking, so you can use at will, but it’s worth remembering that a lot of time and effort goes into developing and testing these plugins, especially with every new release of WP.  If you wonder why some plugins are not updated or upgraded or why a developer doesn’t answer your queries, well consider how much time each request or question takes to answer, for little or no reward.

So for those plugins that you find really useful, especially those more obscure or complex ones, consider hitting that donate button, or buying something from the developer’s wishlist. They’ve worked hard, a little reward can go a long way in terms of keeping the blood flowing round this vast body of work that is Wordpress, and contributes to the goodwill that makes this platform so unique.

Social media is experiencing its gold rush at the moment, everyone is keen to get in on the act, but there is a dearth of tangible data available, and a lack of understanding within the mainstream. This is of course, bringing out the best in some people – the Social Media Snake Oil Salesman has become an increasingly visible character over the past few months. Perhaps you’ve met him already, have a look at the below video and see if you recognise him/her…

Ever seen these little symbols at the bottom of an article or blog post? Or clicked the “share” button on a webpage thinking you’re going to be able to email to a friend only to be offered a cacophony of little mini-clipart pics instead of a simple form and wondered What are these little gremlins invading the web?

Not ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics but "common" social bookmarks

Welcome to the world of Social Bookmarking – a suite of very useful services, which are largely under-utilised, both by readers, and contributors on the web.

Ok so what is Social Bookmarking?

In a nutshell - Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, organize, manage and search bookmarks of web pages using tags.

Essentially it’s an online version of the bookmarks button at the top of your browser or your links (bookmarks) toolbar  if you use one. But it’s more advanced than that…

But why should I bother with these social bookmarks?

1. Mobility - They’re online (in the “cloud”) so you have them wherever you go, whatever computer you use

2. Unlimited -There’s a limit to how many bookmarks you will really use in your browser - technically there isn’t (that i know of) but realistically, the 10 that are in my link menu are the ones i use all the time. the rest are largely forgotten.

3. Searchability – you are encouraged to tag bookmarks as you make them – so you can find things again easily, even if it’s months later

4. Wisdom of the crowd - you can access the pages bookmarked by other people in addition to your own giving you an easy way to find useful, pertinent information that other people recommend

There are lots of Social bookmarking sites – which to use?

There are many types of social bookmarking – each with a different use. To get you started here’s some of the most popular ones:

Delicious – the classic social bookmarking  web service for storing, sharing, and discovering webpages

Digg – a social news website where people submit links and stories, people can vote submissions up and down (and comment on them). The most popular stories appear on the homepage . Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the “dugg” website – the “Digg Effect”

Reddit – like digg, is a social news website on which users can submit links to webpages they recommend. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, the most popular appear on the Reddit homepage.

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