Blog production toolkit: essential WordPress plugins

One of the neat things about WordPress is that there’s a whole slew of programmers out there writing “improvements” for it in the form of plug-ins. A plugin is a bit of stand-alone code that adds a new or enhanced function to your WordPress blog. Plugins might be used to control spam comments, remind visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, or even pull in headlines from the feed of another website. Over the past couple of years I’ve added and removed plenty of WordPress plugins, and have found the following to be the most useful and trouble-free:

Akismet – this is spam-comment fighting plugin and it comes with the WordPress software.
FeedSmith – runs the RSS feed from the blog through Google’s FeedBurner service, which allows you to track your number of feed subscribers and otherwise maximize the power of your feed.
SubscribeRemind – Reminds readers to subscribe to your blog’s RSS Feed.
All-In-One SEO Pack – allows you to optimize your blog’s posts and pages for exposure in the search engines.
Sociable – Reminds readers to share your content with favorite ‘social’ sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Technorati.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Whenever a new version of WordPress comes out, WPAU helps you update in a flash. (I recently upgraded four blogs to the latest version of WordPress in under 10 minutes, with no glitches.)
WP-DB-Backup – Lets you schedule backups of your WordPress Database at regular intervals.

Each of these plugins is free – you simply download the code, then upload it into your wp-contents/plugin folder, and activate it in the WP dashboard.