More Plugins!

Hey guys and gals!  A lot of you have told me you appreciated the WordPress plugins list I posted a while back.  Since I wrote that post, I've discovered a few more plugins that I don't know how I lived without, as well as remembered an important one that I forgot to list in the first post.  So here you go!  As usual, you've got to be a self-hosted WordPress user in order to have access to plugins.  All of these except one can be installed directly from the WordPress plugins directory; just go to Plugins–>Add New on your WordPress dashboard unless otherwise noted.

Recommended WordPress plugins

• WP Greet Box – I love this one!  It allows you to set custom greeting messages to appear at the top or bottom of your posts, depending on where the visitor came from.  So, for example, if they came from Twitter, you can set the message to give them a link they can use to automatically tweet about your post.  A lot of my blog's traffic is from search engines, so I like being able to ask Googlers to enter a giveaway, subscribe to my feed, or whatever else.  Includes default messages for lots of social media sites, along with their logos.
• Zemanta – I just started using this one after discovering it on the Dashboard of my new True/Slant column.  It can do a lot of stuff; the only thing I've yet used it for is automatically inserting photographs into posts.  It recommends legal-for-use photos that you can insert with a single click, or you can search for photos to use.  So for example, if I want to write a post about trail running but don't have a picture of myself trail running, I can just search for a free stock image to insert.  Also includes features to sync with Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, and provides one-click linking for phrases you type that have associated webpages.
• Akismet – The basic comment-spam filter that WordPress.com uses.  Apparently it's not included with all WordPress installs, so if you don't have it, get it.
• Cross-linker – I just found out about this one from a Remarkablogger email.  Basically, it allows you to have certain phrases automatically link somewhere, presumably another one of your posts.  For example, I could set it up so that whenever I type "Boston Marathon," the phrase is linked to another post I wrote about qualifying for Boston.  Huge time-saver!  Unfortunately, this one can't be one-click installed (at least, not an up-to-date version), so you have to download it from the site and use FTP to install it.  Not hard, but maybe more work than you care to do.

Ok, that should be plenty to keep you busy.  I'm just starting to use a few of these, so feel free to get in touch with me about questions or features you discover.