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Building a better WordPress...

Looking to start your own WordPress site, or just improve a current one? Here are the WordPress plugins that I love best.

After The Deadline

I think that there are very few things, other than real people, that can help you become a better writer. Word definitely does not do it. After The Deadline does. After blogging with After The Deadline over the last two weeks I’ve actually seen my writing improve.

This plugin performs checks on both your grammar, readability and spelling. I highly recommend it.

Akismet

Kill your spam. Just kill it. Then stomp on it so it can never hurt anyone else again.

All in One SEO Pack

Build SEO juice with what is, as far as I can tell, the best plugin for this purpose around.

CommentLuv

Allow your users to automatically link to their latest blog post. I think it’s pretty useful. You should comment below and try it out. Tell me what you think.

Do Follow

Your spam is blocked, so give your commenters some credit and let them get juice from links they post.

FD Feedburner Plugin

Allows you to redirect your RSS feeds to their equivalent on FeedBurner, which is much more friendly. I even use it on this site to redirect individual category feeds.

Google News Sitemap Feed with Multisite Support

Just started using this when my old Sitemap plugin stopped working. Not sure how I feel about it yet. I’m open to suggestions, any better ones out there?

More Fields

I use this to build custom fields for displaying odd, different or unique things in posts. On this blog, it is most prominently used for the subtitle. It is simple and easy to use. Great if you set up a site for non-tech people and want to use custom fields.

podPress

Just the best podcasting plugin.

Popupper

I really like the ability to have little tooltips to add an upper dimension to my posts. This plugin throws out some odd errors and doesn’t allow you to edit pop-ups after you’ve created them. It’s not as good as I’d like, but I haven’t found anything else.

Do you know a better plugin for doing this? Please tell me.

PubSubHubbub

Is this integrated into the WP core now? If it isn’t you should get it. This plugin allows you to push real-time RSS updates to compatible feed readers.

SEO Super Comments

Pumps comments up with extra SEO juice. Not sure how well it works yet, not enough comments.

Sharedaddy

Creates the nifty sharing bar on the bottom of this post. I need to look up the CSS to make it appear on the top. I’d prefer the option to have it show up in both places.

Subscribe to comments

What it says.

Twitterlink Comments

Allows users to input their Twitter handle into the comments field. Once again, a great encouragement to get commenters in theory. So far not working in practice.

upPrev

Allows you to have the nifty slide-out button that appears when you scroll down on a post.

WordPress Mobile Pack

So far the best plugin I’ve found for making your WordPress site mobile compatible. Even makes the back-end mobile friendly.

WPBook

Allows you to create a WordPress app out of your blog.

WP Emphasis

With a double-tap of the shift key you can now link to words or sentences in any of my posts.

WP Super Cache

If you are ever fortunate enough to have an article go viral, this should keep your server from crashing.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

I use it to create better engagement in my RSS feed. It just automatically lists related posts at the end of an article. Pretty useful.

Bonus round!

FeedWordPress is the plugin I use to feed other blogs into my aggregator site at http://aramzs.me.

If you want to embed Tweets frequently, Twitter Blackbird Pie is the way to go.

Eliminated

BackType Connect

BackType decided to go subscription. So they just turned off their plugin without telling anyone or changing anything or giving you any options. I don’t like them anymore. I’m looking at IntenseDebate as an alternative.