Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

Weblog Tools Collection » WordPress Plugin Meme

in honor of Ben switching to wordpress, i thought i should post this.

Plugins I'm Using

Extended Live Archives
what: AJAX article history
rate: 10/10. absolutely phenomenal. i can actually find what i want out of my 221 posts. and the options panel gives reeeeeally fine-grained control over everything.

Akismet
what: comment spam blacklist
rate: 6/10. i actually forgot about this plugin, until i randomly noticed that it was doing its job without pestering me. con: you can't read the spam, once it's been marked as spam. unless you mark it not spam. only to find out that the plugin was right, it was spam.

UPDATE:
Matt alerted me to an updated version of the akismet plugin that lets me see the spam before i delete it. 10/10 for now explicitly showing me that it's doing its job.

Blogs of the Day
what: mechanism for pinging yet another list of recent and popular articles.
rate: 3/10. it's a popularity contest. And I'm not very popular. 3 points for not requiring a backlink to their site.

Scrobbles
what: list of recently played tracks, via audioscrobbler
rate: 5/10. i don't know why, but every other audioscrobbler plugin requires code to be added to the footer. code that never works on my blog. this plugin doesn't, but it also doesn't provide a link to the song.

Text Filter Suite
what: post filtering, including Acronymit and Talk Like A Pirate
rate: 9/10. i never realized how many acronyms i used, until i started seeing little question marks all over my blog. fortunately it's very easy to add more acronyms to their list.

Subscribe to Comments
what: email notifications of responses to your comments
rate: 2/10. great idea. the manage subscriptions panel doesn't seem to work.

Following Plugins Built intoSquible

wp_cats_as_tags
what: modifies wordpress' category system to be more like del.icio.us tags.
rate: 2/10. maybe i'd like it if i had more than 10 categories? but then i'd probably use tags exclusively, and not rely on the wordpress category system.

limit post
what: limit post length on the front page, strip some HTML
rate: 6/10. now that there's the option of which HTML tags to strip, its actually pretty cool.

customizable post listings
what: Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, etc.
rate: 10/10. instead of scrolling through 10 pages of old posts, see what you want, right away.

Gravatars
what: globally recognized avatar
rate: 0/10. gravatars.com is down today. with some note about complaining to his webhosts that he's not paying for enough bandwidth. This isn't single-sign-on, or even close. anyone who knows my e-mail address can pretend to be me. i'll be removing this 'feature' as soon as i have time to.