My WordPress Plugin List: Part 1

I believe in blogger appreciation, and one free way to appreciate a blogger is to link to his blog. My thanks in this post series goes to all the WordPress plugin developers that made my blogging life that much easier. The following is the list of 5 plugins out of many that I use. Many more posts like these will appearing the future.

AdSense Deluxe
This plugin is very useful in embedding ads into your posts, and other parts of the blog. Also what makes it great, is that it is not limited to only AdSense, which can increase your revenue if used correctly.

Akismet Anti-Spam
This plugin comes default with every WordPress installation, and it checks every comment made on your site against a database that is updated globally. So far it has caught 20 comments that were just spam, without me having to do anything.

Brian’s Threaded Comments
This plugin allows the comments to be threaded. This is very useful when you are replying to a comment made earlier, because it will put everything you are saying into context without having to do much work. It does require you to edit your WordPress theme a bit, but it is a simple change.

Click Tracking
This plugin is more fun than useful, at least for me. After gathering data, it displays a heat map where on each posts your visitors clicked. After you receive over 1000 clicks, you will get some interesting, and quite accurate heat maps. For example, I learned that few people scroll down to the comments section. Instead the clicks are concentrated in the middle-top of the blog.

diggIT
This is a simple plugin that adds a digg button to all your posts. You can place it anywhere you want by modifying your WordPress template a bit.