Sponge Project Blog ~ Web design in Tewkesbury

As is the way of things, I need to praise those who are better than me at certain things. One of these areas is plugins for Wordpress (the technology behind this blog for those not in the know).

Plugins offer fanatic ways to enhance and extend your blog and in many cases are so easy to install it hurts. Upload, activate, configure…couldn’t be simpler. So, in no particular order then, here are the plugins I swear by:

Google Analytics plugin

A must have (IMHO) for website managers who use Google Web Analytics for other sites. This allows me to integrate my stats for main website and blog into one service.

Spam Karma 2

For some reason my previous hosting company (who shall not be named) didn’t allow me to use Askimet, which comes pre-packaged with new Wordpress installs. Instead I hunted around until Spam Karma 2 caught my eye. I don’t generate a huge amount of traffic on this site, but all those that have been spam, have been caught and locked up. 100% record can’t be bad eh?

Subscribe to comments

Great tool for engaging your blog readers. Enables you as a commenter to “subscribe” to the post and receive an email back with any subsequent comments made. Allows you to keep you finger in the pulse of any favourite or important blog posts.

Backup Wordpress

Another essential tool for a blogger. As the name suggests this plugin lets you create an entire backup (database included) of your blog, so should the unfortunate happen (which invariably it does) you don’t loose everything. Nifty additional feature lets you email yourself a copy of the backup.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

Mike’s a genius in my eyes. Not only does he run a great blog, but he also created this fantastic contact form in conjunction with Mike Jolley. Anti-spam, accessible and easy to install, this is a great plugin for those not fully conversant with PHP.

Related Posts

Rather than having to think about what related posts you’ve written in the past, this plugin automatically selects a number of previous posts based on keywords and displays a list at the bottom of every post. This helps keep your readers engaged by offering more for them to read at the click of a button.

Slashdigglicious

There are loads of these plugins around, but I plumbed for this one because it’s minimal and unobtrusive. Several small logos for the common social tagging and bookmarking sites are displayed at the bottom of each post. Easy to edit and style to your own needs.