9 WordPress Plugins to Make you ‘Happy Go Lucky’

I love wordpress, when it works, and people keep it fully up to date, and don’t use plugins which are so out of date that they have rusted themselves into the application…that said an done there are a few plugins which really stand out from the crowd. They are all equally great, so please ignore the numbering order.

1. Akismet

Probably obvious considering it does come with WordPress but one tip I’d give is that if you have multiple blogs, just use the same API key for all of them, I do, and I haven’t had any problems yet and saves setting up new ones each time. This plugin is also the reason why you do not need to have ‘no follow’ links in your comments, which was originally designed to help stop spam links… It’s redundant!

No link needed

2. MobilePress

More and more of us are becoming sad internet addicts and have mobile capable mobiles, 12 million of us infact (at time of writing), and thus we are reading more on the move, this is thanks to the market dominance of people like Apple and their ‘iPhone’ which make them loads of i£’s. Either way, MobilePress is a nice easy way of making your blog entirely viewable by mobiles which choose not to view your site in full, it works pretty well, and opens up your site to a host of new visitors who might otherwise just leave and ‘wake up’ to the real world, which might be in their case a lamp post they could walk into.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

3. Headspace2 (SEO Plugin)

Now I discovered headspace because my older plugin died on an upgrade of Wordpress so Headspace came to my rescue, very kind of them and very powerful too, it allows so much more optimisation than any other SEO plugin I have seen, and gets my 2 thumbs up! It IS meta-data on steroids!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/

4. Sociable (Social Networking Links)

Now all the cool kids are doing it now, yes I’m talking about Facebook, Twitter and Digg‘in (oh yeah I’m cool), which means that you’re probably missing a trick if your not sharing with all the good folks who have nothing better to do than share your link around the net. Check it out! It has so many to choose from, we don’t choose them all, only 5 or 6, see above.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

5. Twitter Tools

Twitter is bigger than ever, so big it now graces us with its crashing pretty much once per week (lately). But when its not crashing its a good way to let people know about how brilliant you are back on earth, otherwise known as your blog. I say that because some poor sod has come up with words like the ‘twittersphere‘, like Twitter is some mystical world where people can only talk in 160 characters. But luckily thats just enough characters to tell someone about your wonderful new blog post, and we also turn that upside down and have Twitter Post to the blog in its own twitter section. This alone has added 10% traffic to Wuup lately.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/

6. Subscribe 2 – Newsletter Plugin for Wordpress

Especially for smaller blogs, subscribe 2 is a nice free way to give newsletters to the followers if your blog. Defiantly something that I recommend, it adds a new dynamic, especially if you haven’t thought about what you want to achieve from your blog, at least you can capture email addresses in the mean time and then let them know when you have had your epiphany. It’s easy enough to install, I did have trouble spotting the widget to add to the sidebar, but you have to turn it on in the settings.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe2/

7. GD Star Rating – Allow Users to Rate your Articles

No strings attached, your users can give ratings to your article (rate this one highly…I know who you are), no pressure, no signup, they can just click a star, and give you some lovely feedback on how good or how bad your article was. Also a good way to improve your writing skills to know that you struck a cord, or offended someone (usually I offend). It’s probably my 2nd favourite plugin, just below headspace2, but it really is awesome, and adds that little touch of interactivity to your blog. Go!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-star-rating/

8. TweetMeMe – Retweeting has never been so easy

Wow number 8 already, I was having fun with this article, but let me tell you about TweetMeMe, its kinda spawned out of no where for me as being one of the most popular Twitter Related sites ever. But it now has a cool plugin to easily have your users Retweet your amazing articles like this one Hehe (shameless self promotion). Check it out!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/

9. Podcasting

What a great plugin, I won’t say much more than that, its self explanatory for sure, here’s the link

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podcasting/