A warning to all you who are considering starting your own self-hosted blog. It’s a lot of work. All that stuff that Blogger or WordPress does for you in the background is suddenly your job. The reason folks like myself do it is that we want more control, our own domain, our own design, and lots of bells and whistles. I enjoy it to an extent. But it can be a serious time sink. So consider whether you’re willing to invest several hours a week to manage a blog when you could be doing other stuff.
I use WordPress because it’s the best.
Here are the plugins I use and why:
- AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: It’s the little Share at the bottom of each post
- Advanced Random Posts: This is my deceptively names “Featured Posts” widget. Keeps content churning.
- Advanced Tagline: Since I have the attention span of a circus flea I like to have a constant rotation of taglines on my blog.
- Akismet: SPAM
- All in One SEO Pack: Everyone else uses it so I do to.
- Audio player
- Contact Form 7
- Lightbox 2: Nice image handling
- Organize Series: Allows me to group posts into meaningful series.
- PollDaddy Polls
- Quotes Collection: This is feeds the Lingaverse widget
- Random Posts: lingamish.com/?random
- Shashin: Manage my Picasa photo galleries
- Subscribe To Comments
- Theme Switcher Reloaded
- Thumbnail For Excerpts 2
- WordPress.com Stats
- WordPress Database Backup
- WP Easy Uploader
- WP Security Scan
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
So there you have it. Sound like fun?
Oops, forgot to mention: SwfObj Plugin for Flash.
Blimey! Why? One or two I can understand, but there seem to be more plugins here than the C of E has articles or Luther had theses! Are any of them except Akismet really useful?
What’s a bicycle without the bell?
But Wordpress comes with a good bell, it’s all the extra whistles I can’t quite see the point of.
Besides don’t wriggle, answer the question! Aside from Akismet which ones are actually useful, and what do they do?
The essentials: 1, 9, 14 and 17-20.
The rest are about good design which is essential to content in my book. But you don’t even like this crazy theme so I don’t expect you to buy that argument!
If WP stats is anything like the stats on WP.com, that’s gotta be the second most essential (after Akismet). I have a Blogspot blog that I barely log into because I can’t really tell if anyone is paying attention.
Again this begs the question why have your own self-hosted blog when you have to set up all this stuff that runs automatically and stays updated on wordpress.com. Of course if you’re a gadget guru like me…
David, don’t forget that several of these plugins are now automatically included with self-hosted WordPress as well as with wordpress.com. That includes Akismet and I think stats. They are called plugins probably for historical reasons, perhaps because they can also be disabled.
None of these are part of the core installation. Switching from .com caused a lot of chaos for media like audio, you tube, slide and more. If you’re text and photo only it’s not a prob but if you’re multi media like me you’re going to need a grab bag of plug ins to get back to where .com starts.