Tadd Mencer

I never really was one for using tools to help me manage my site. It always felt like cheating for some unknown reason. However, hindsight, it’s probably a good idea to use some soft of 3rd party tool to get me rolling.

Weblob Tools Collection has a few links in Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done that give bloggers nice tools to get things rolling.

Right now I’m using Windows Live Writer. Trying it out. There are some nice features, but I’m not sure if I really .. LIKE it or not.

People area also talking up ScribeFire … which I may look into after this. We’ll see what works the best for me. Really, in the end, use what works the best for you.

For instance, I use a lot of WordPress Plugins. 28 to be exact. Not all are for functionality, but all are used.

PLUGINS

Admin Notes
Creates and manages a very simple notes system for maintaining a to-do list etc. By Paul Morley.

AdSense Manager
Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours. By Martin Fitzpatrick.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose.

Better Comments Manager
Better Comments manager allows you to view your comments post wise, it also allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel without you having to visit the site to respond to comments By Keith Dsouza.

Configurable Tag Cloud
A tag cloud plugin for Wordpress 2.3 to give you more flexibility with the styling of your tag cloud. By Keith Solomon.

Dagon Design Form Mailer
The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script By Dagon Design.

Delink Comment Author
Adds a link to comment e-mails for you to remove the URL the commentor left. Useful if you want to ditch the comment URL but keep the comment. By Alex King.

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. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold.

Highlight Author Comments
Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by the post’s author. By Rob Marsh, SJ.

iBegin Share
Adds a “Share” button to your posts. By David Cramer.

Magic Keywords
Determines the best keywords for your individual blog posts and pages — works almost like magic! By Richard D. LeCour.

MaxBlogPress Favicon
Easily add favicon to your blog without editing any wordpress files. By MaxBlogPress.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin By MaxBlogPress.

NextGEN Gallery
A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the WEB2.0(beta). By NextGEN DEV-Team.

NextGEN Gallery Widget
Adds a sidebar widget support to your NextGEN Gallery By NextGEN DEV-Team.

NoFollow Free
Remove the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc… Supports multilingual and a Top Commenters sidebar Widget. By Michele Marcucci.

Ozh’ Absolute Comments
Reply instantly to comments, either from the email notification, or the usual Comments page, without loading the post first. For WordPress 2.5+ By Ozh.

Slashdigglicious
Add user-submission icons and links at the bottom of each post: Digg, del.icio.us, etc. By Robert Tsai.

StatPress
Real time stats for your blog By Daniele Lippi.

TabStat
Show Your Database Table Status(Rows, Data Length, Index Length, Size, and Overhead). You can optimize it too. By Abdul Ibad.

Viper’s Video Quicktags
Allows you to embed various video types, including those hosted at YouTube and Google Video as well as videos you host yourself, into WordPress. Credits: Owen Winkler for ButtonSnap and An-archos for help with WP 2.1+ button code. By Viper007Bond.

WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to Wordpress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode. By Keith Dsouza.

Wordpress Download Monitor
Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. Downloads page found at “Manage>Downloads”. By Mike Jolley.

wp-cache (Haven’t figured out if this really helps at all)
2.1.2

Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. By Ricardo Galli Granada.

WP Auto Tagger
Automatically finds tags based on your post content. By iDope.

WP_MonsterID
This plugin generates email specific monster icons for each user based on code and images by Andreas Gohr and images by Lemm. By Scott Sherrill-Mix.

Of course this is what I like to use, not what is really necessary. This is just good stuff that I appreciate and use. As said, not sure what WP-Cache really does for me … but it’s there anyway.

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