My current WordPress plugins

Because I have a friend who is kicking off a new WordPress-powered blog (Hi, Substitute!), I thought I’d list the plugins I use here at Netninja.com.  I have a whopping 32 of them, but many are simple single-purpose things that are likely not of general interest.  My plugins can be be broken down into a few categories:

Administrative

  • After The Deadline – A spelling and grammar checker when writing posts.
  • Akismet – Spam blocker
  • Categories to Tags Converter – I sometimes get enough posts with a given tag, that I decide to promote that tag to a category.  This plugin lets me do that.
  • Dashboard Links – This is just a static block of arbitrary HTML you can put on your administrative dashboard.  I use it to hold links to metrics (Google Analytics, FeedBurner, etc.)
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith – Route your RSS through FeedBurner
  • Google Analytics for WordPress – Automatically inserts the magic JavaSript for Google Analytics without messing directly with your theme files.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – Generates XML sitemaps for better Google indexing
  • Maintenance Mode – Out to lunch, back in 5.
  • OpenID – I use netninja.com as an OpenID server.  This provides that functionality.  It also provides OpenID client functionality, like if someone wants to leave a comment under their Blogger/LiveJournal/Yahoo/whatever account.
  • RSS Footer – A bit of boilerplate at the bottom of each RSS item, used to help prevent spammers from harvesting my RSS for link farms.
  • WP Super Cache – A WordPress site without this will not hold up after being linked to by Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, etc.
Social/RSS
  • Get Comments Count – Comment count as an updating image, so that RSS always has the correct number of comments.
  • Sociable – Buttons for folks to like it on Facebook, dig it on Digg, etc.
  • Subscribe to Comments – Allows people to subscribe to comments on a given post via email.  This is a lot easier than trying to dig up the comment-specific RSS feed.
  • Twitter Tools – Tweet your posts, pull your recent tweets into the blog.
  • Twitter Tools Shortcode – Automatically shortens the links when you tweet your posts.
  • Twitter Tools nja.me shortener – I wrote this to override Twitter Tools’ default shortcode and instead us my own nja.me service.
  • Wordbooker – cross-post to Facebook
User Interface
  • Flickr Gallery – I use this to show recent Flickr posts on the homepage
  • Gravatar Hovercards – Fancy display of Gravatar information
  • Hipster PDA Shortcode – I wrote this to insert some boilerplate text at the top of all my Hipster PDA pages
  • List Pages Shortcode – I use this to show recent page updates on the homepage
  • Netninja Custom Meta – I hacked this together to stuff some specific meta tags in all the headers
  • New Tag Cloud – The tag cloud on the homepage
  • NuRealm Get Posts – I use this to show the recent blog posts on the homepage
  • Popular Posts – I use this to show the most popular posts in the sidebar
  • Post-Plugin Library – Prerequisite for Popular Posts and Recent Comments
  • Recent Comments – Show the recent comments in the sidebar
  • Snazzy Archives – Fancy graphic archives.  This currently has a lot of left/right scrolling on the new theme; I’m working on it.
  • WPTouch – All the magic CSS better iPhone access
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – If you liked this post, you might also like…
At one point, I was using wp-typography and Extra Sentence Space.  The former did some really nice hyphenation (though at the expense of cut-and-paste timetimes having weird unprintable junk in it) as well as converting em-dashes and turning regular ampersands into fanciness in alternative fonts.  The later enforced two spaces after a period.  They both sort of ate up a lot of CPU and as much as I liked them, they weren’t worth the extra bump in hosting costs required to keep them running.  The default WordPress install handles smart quotes and converting space-hyphen-hyphen-space to an emdash fairly well.
I would also like to point out the new theme I am using.  I finally dropped Thesis as my theme and went with the default twentyeleven with a custom CSS.  I’m not 100% happy with it yet, but like its visual and administrative simplicity.

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Brian Enigma

Brian Enigma is a Portlander, manipulator of atoms & bits, minor-league blogger, and all-around great guy. He typically writes about the interesting “maker” projects he's working on, but sometimes veers off into puzzles, software, games, local news, and current events.

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