Layered Thoughts

The title says it all.  When I decided to start up this blog, I took some time to go through the plugins section on the Wordpress site to see if there were any plugins that would really make my blog great.  Obviously this was just a blind shot in the air because I had never used Wordpress nor did I have a reason to need anything more than what comes with the default install.  But here we are anyways.  So these are the plugins that I picked to add to Wordpress install in the last few days: Broken Link Checker

Automatically checks broken links in your Wordpress blog and notifies you of any that it finds.  Broken links don’t help anyone, so I figured this was a good little maintenance tool

Google Analyticator

Makes embedding the Google Analytics tracking code really easy.  Granted, copying and pasting the tracking code is something a preschool kid can do so long as he eyes and an index finger. But still, it makes it trivial.  It also adds some settings that would require at least two fingers to change manually so that makes it totally worth it.

SEO Smart Links

SEO is pretty dull.  But it’s necessary if you want your site’s traffic to grow organically.  So any plugins that do this stuff for me gets an A in my book.  This plugin automatically searches through all of your posts and identifies tags and categories and parts of the body that are shared with other posts and pages on your site and turns them into links.

Since Search Engines crawl your site using your sites internal links, it helps to have a good web of links set up to make the crawling go as easily as possible.  Plus, I don’t have to do it.

Sociable

Sociable adds icons to the bottom of every post that makes adding that post to the popular social news sites a single click operation.  After setting up the plugin, I was presented with a list of news sites I had never heard of, but after a minute I found the ones I use pretty frequently (except for Hackers News unfortunately).  I added this plugin in the hopes that one day someone will submit me to Reddit or Digg.  I’ll probably end up doing it myself in desperation but still, it’s there if someone feels so inclined.

Video Quicktags

I set up this plugin because of my second post.  I had embedded the video, which was from Blip.tv, but then discovered that it was set to autoplay. I fucking hate autoplay.  So I set out to stop it.

I couldn’t figure it out from the Blip website.  Usually I’m good at that stuff, but that day I was failing pretty hard.  So I found some other video plugin and used that to embed the video and it worked great.  Then last night I went to my blog to check things out and discovered the video wasn’t working.  After a few minutes I just decided to toss that previous plugin and subsequently found Video Quicktags.

This plugin adds links to the top of the posting box for all of the major video sites that make posting a video a cut and past operation.

Plus there’s no autoplay.

WP-Spamfree

As I wrote in my previous post about WP-Spamfree, I chose this plugin over Akismet simply because it required less effort to setup.  That’s it.  I just didn’t want to put in the effort.  As long as it doesn’t block real comments, I will consider it a success.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Kind of like SEO Smart Links, this plugin attempts to create a list of 3 links at the bottom of every post that point to other posts that are the most similar on your blog.  Some more SEO link building basically.  It’s supposed to run through every part of your posts, from the titles to the body to the tags and categories and use a special algorithm to choose the most relevant posts to link to.  This is all great, but you just need to make sure you have enough posts for this plugin to run through to really see success with this one.

XML-Sitemap

This is supposed to create a sitemap for your site after every post you make and then submit that to all the major search engines.  I know Sitemaps are important but I’m not sure if sending one after every post is really a best practice.  Plus, from what I’ve read, Sitemaps are only necessary if your site is hard to crawl for search engines.  If I find out this plugin screws anything up I’ll toss it but until then, I think it’s fine.

So that’s the list.  Not too many plugins there, and I feel like they all serve a specific purpose that should help me in some way down the line.  I’m sure I’ll be deleting some and adding some as time goes on, so I’ll write about that when it happens. Hopefully someone can use this list when they’re setting up their own Wordpress blog one day.