Fish and Clicks

It seems that every blog has at least one post outlining what funky WordPress plugins and widgets they are utilising and so without further ado here’s mine.

A4uback
No doubt familiar to all those who use the A4U Affiliate forums this smart little widget allows people to back posts that they like or just want to boost a little within the community. They only difference with my version is that I’ve customised the logo colour and size slightly to match my template.

Askimet
Ok, no surprise here as it is part of the standard WordPress install but let’s face it Askimet can’t cope with the volume of spam and speed at which spammers alter their tactics. This is why I have the other plugins below to help strengthen it. :)

All in One SEO Pack
An absolutely essential plugin for WordPress SEO purposes and in my opinion one of the best ones out there at the moment. Apart from the standard home page settings allowing you to customise all your meta tags, titles etc it also deals with nofollow, noindex and individual titles for categories, archives, search results etc. Again, when creating individual posts all the essential functionality is there as it should be.

Audio player
Not a WordPress plugin that I use often but ideal for those who want to stream audio files such as podcasts. It’s simple, effective and you can see it in action here in a previous click fraud podcast.

Crazy Egg
Ever wanted to use those funky website heat maps to visualise how people interact with your website. This one’s for you.

Exec PHP
The exec PHP plugin allows you to run PHP in your posts, pages and more importantly your widgets.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. There are lots of XML Sitemap plugins out there but this particular one comes with a plethora of options allowing you customise to your hearts content.

WP lightbox 2
Add a touch of flair and presentation to your blog with this plugin which creates the popular lightbox effect.

Maintenance Mode
Very simple, but very useful plug in this one. Simply switch on when you want to temporarily close your blog to run updates, back up your database or customise your template without revealing all those ugly mistakes. Switch back on when you’re finished.

Math Comment Spam Protection
The first of my WordPress additions to cut down spam. It’s a simple challenge and response maths question. The user has to complete a very simple sum to prove they are human before submitting their comment. It’s slightly restrictive but I think most appreciate the reasoning behind it.

Most Commented
Does exactly what it says on the tin - retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments.

Popularity Contest
Retrieves a list of the most popular posts that I can then display anywhere I like. Great. What nice about this is that it uses the behaviour of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. It does so by giving you the option to configure and weight various scenarios such as trackbacks and page views.

Related Posts
This is a new one for me and one that I’m just trailing. It’s a little erratic at times but I get the impression that this is to do with tagging your posts correctly and it’ll just a matter of time before it settles down.

Robots Meta
I came across this wordpress plugin on a very highly rated SEO blog. It’s a little geeky but allows you to address the duplicate issue that many bloggers are unaware they even have - Think what happens when you have 1 post which is identical on the front page, it’s post category, it’s archive and it’s tag category.

Simple Trackback Validation
Another one of my spam busting tools, this time addressing trackback spam which appears to be on the increase. It works by (1) checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and (2) by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog. Take that spammers!

Subscribe To Comments
Why this isn’t integrated into WordPress right off the bat is beyond me?! A great plugin that allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

WP-DBManager
The mother of all WordPress Databse Backup plugins. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of your database.

Google Analytics for WordPress
Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress. In a word, excellent.

Phew, that’s the lot. I’ll try to keep this post updated as and when I add new ones but for now I hope this will help a few bloggers out there.

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