Tenacious Creations

 The other day I was asked if I could recommend any good plug ins to use with Word Press. Well to be honest I only use about 15 plug ins. So I decided I would provide a list of the plug ins I use and the reasons I use them. If you have know of a great useful plug in that I have missed on this list please let me know. I would love to give it a try.

1. Adsense Deluxe This is the plug in I use for controlling the advertising from Google. It is pretty simplistic and I know there are others out there. But what I like about this one is it allows me to precisely control where the ads are in my posts.
2. Akismet This is my spam guard for the comments and I highly recommend you use this plug in on your blog. It is pretty accurate, and has only let a wee little bit of spam through, and so far has never identified a legit comment as spam.
3. Get Recent Comments Well this does just what it says, it gets the recent comments from your posts and displays them as a widget. I initially installed this so that people could follow their comments on the posts simply by going to the main page. That was of course before I installed the subscribe to comments plug in.
4. Maintenace Mode This is a very useful plug in if you are updating your Word Press blog. It displays an under maintenance page to your readers while you perform site critical updates and changes. It allows you to display how long your site will be down. Not only is it a courtesy for your readers it prevents new readers from thinking your page doesn’t exists anymore. Of course you still want to keep your down time to as little as possible.
5. Php Markdown When I came across this plug in in my plug in directories I actually had to read up on what it does. That’s the sign of good software it runs in the background doing its job. Basically this converts your non html formatting to html so you don’t have to remember things like & nbsp;.
6. Related Posts This plug in puts links for posts relating to a post based on the tags you use. It is a real nice feature to allow your readers to keep reading on a particular topic that you have blogged on.
7. SEO Siloing This plug in basically optimizes your site for a search engine optimization technique called Siloing. To explain SEO siloing would take a post in itself.







8. Stumbleupon it This is a great little plug in that puts a link at the bottom of your posts so your users can add it Stumbleupon it.
9. Subscribe to Comments This is a great plug in, it allows your readers to follow the chain of comments for a post. When I comment on a blog that does not have this I tend never to return to see if any one commented on my comment. Well this handy plug in solves that.
10. Word Press Stats This plug in provides a free service to track the stats of your blog. It tells you which posts were more popular, what links your readers clicked off your site etc.. It is not nearly as good as Google Analytics or other free trackers but it is a nice feature in your admin dash board.
11. Word Press Data Base Back Up You have all heard the mantra - back up back up back up. Well this plug in allows you to do just that, just in case something happens you can rest well knowing you have to your database backed up. That means all that hard work you put into writing those posts is saved. It is also really useful when moving to a new server.
12. Word Press Cache This plug in speeds up your site and reduces load on your server by caching word press pages and storing them in a static file for future use. This would be real handy for an extremely heavily trafficked site, but even on a low traffic site you can see improvements in load speeds.
13. Contact Form This is a real simple plug in that makes it a breeze to put a contact form on your blog. It even has some rudimentary defenses against spammers.
14. All in One SEO Pack This plug is set up help you make your posts search engine optimised. Now of course no software can do it all, you still need some knowledge of SEO practices but this does make it easier.

 Now I am sure there are a lot more awesome plug ins out there. If you know of some post them in the comments.

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