I know I occasionally come across another blog with a cool feature I want but can’t easily identify, so to better serve you, dear reader, here’s a list of the plugins that make this site tick.
- Akismet: It only took 2 weeks for the spambots to find me and leave comments about a great job opportunity in New Jersey! Akismet takes care of all that. Vital blog tool.
- Friends RSS Aggregator: Handy dandy plugin that makes my Peeps page work, because I missed the handy friends-view feature of LiveJournal. One downer: it disables the Wordpress Dashboard front page (so no “Latest Activity” or “Incoming Links” updates). You also have to modify the page template code by hand if you want to use a links category not named “Friends,” and if you want multiple categories to have their own page, you’ll have to create multiple page template files. Somebody better at PHP than I should really look into using some variables in the code to identify the requested category in the URL and create the appropriate page template on the fly.
- Favatars: I’m too lazy to make a Gravatar, but I do have a favicon, and so do a bunch of my net friends. Favatar automatically checks the link supplied by a commenter, and if it finds a favicon, it slaps it up next to the commenter name. So make yourself a favicon!
- Get Recent Comments: Display the last N comments in your sidebar. Not the clearest configuration instructions in the world, which is why (at this time) it doesn’t include the post title in the summary as I have it installed. But it works and I didn’t feel like trying out multiple plugins.
- Nice titles: Not so much a plugin as a javascript. Works faster than the FancyTooltips plugin. I replaced the semi-transparent .PNG background image with basic colors in the CSS stylesheet, and briefly messed around with the Mozilla “opacity” attribute before I found it too annoying and removed it.
- Random Header Image: Unnecessary frilly decoration, perhaps, but essential for indecisive dorks like me who can’t make up their mind on just one header image. Make multiple banners of the right size, put them in a single directory, and this plugin does the rest. Just make sure all your images are visually compatible with your title and tagline (I obviously need to darken a couple of mine).
- Feedburner Feed Replacement - When people use the built-in yourblog.com/feed/ link to subscribe to your blog, this plugin detects the first request and sends their aggregator a permanent redirect code to your Feedburner.com feed — somehow managing to sidestep the circular path that Feedburner also pulls from /feed/. This is nice for using FB’s subscription tracking.
- Subscribe to Comments - Just what it says. I was hoping it’d help keep the conversations going, but so few of you bastards actually bother to use it.
- Sideblog - A nifty plugin that accomplishes two (or four) jobs at once: it takes selected categories out of the main page content; it tricks The Loop into not counting them so you still get your expected N entries on the front page; it allows you to remove that category from your feeds; and then it puts a configurable excerpt in your sidebar where you call its function. I’m using this plugin for two things right now:
- In the Margins - the real purpose of “asides,” the small, not-quite-a-post references to things worth a passing comment.
- I Recommend - I wanted a separate category of asides just to point you to videos and books that I’ve really enjoyed. This took some tweaking to get the thumbnail images to show up in the Excerpts; in fact, I might have had to go into The Loop and tweak its handling of comments, using a hack from the comments on Kates Gasis’ blog. This allows using a smaller thumbnail in the Excerpt of the entry and the full size image in the post. I also like having the option of writing a longer review of the recommended item in the post itself, which is why I didn’t just create a new category for…
- Del.icio.us links - I use the basic javascript provided at their site to list my last 3 or 4 bookmarks that I tag with the word “blog.” Obviously, writing a whole movie review in the Description section of a tagged link would get ungainly, hence the need for Sideblog.
- WP-Contact Form - Why CGI myself when I don’t have to? Simple enough.
