Think – Write – Connect

WordPress has dominated my life over the past two months. I have spent more time with WordPress than I have even with my own girlfriend. Luckily for me, she has been busy with both work and school during this time. Thus, my love affair with WordPress and its endless supply of plugins has been able to go on virtually unabated.

For my first ever post here at ArticleCast I have decided to create a quick Top Five List of fantastic plugins that I try to use on every blog I manage. This is by no means an exhaustive list of fantastic WordPress plugins, just the five that I am most in love with today, October 2, 2008.

1: User-Online WordPress Plugin – This plugin allows you to view who is on your site in real time. The report is broken down by blog users, guests, and bots. You have the ability to create a page that displays this information in detail, and you can also place a widget in your sidebar that displays a summary. The most exciting moment of my week thus far was installing this plugin on my sports blog and realizing that I have developed it to the point where there is virtually always at least two bots crawling my pages. Even better, you have the ability to see exactly what page each user, guest, and bot is on. And it updates real time!

I should probably stop here before I get too excited and give you a link to where you can download this plugin:

User-Online WordPress Plugin

2: Featurific Plugin for Wordpress – Featurific is a great plugin for the main index page of a blog. This plugin (as seen on the main index of ArticleCast) allows you to display a scrolling window of posts based on the criteria of your choice: most commented, most popular, most recent, etc. The window also includes the first image from the post, if one is available. Installing it can include a few extra steps beyond just hitting activate, so make sure to read the readme files. But Featurific is a great way to give your blog a slick look and highlight your best posts.

Featurrific Plugin for WordPress

3: ShareThis WordPress Plugin – There are a multitude of social bookmarking plugins to use for WordPress. I have pretty much tried them all, and ShareThis is by far the best in my opinion. We use ShareThis here on ArticleCast, and I have begun using as standard procedure on all blogs. All of the major social bookmarking sites are included (Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc) as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. ShareThis allows you one click access to easy social bookmarking, all contained within a tidy little green icon at the bottom of every post. Highly, highly recommended.

ShareThis WordPress Plugin

4: WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin for WordPress – We do not and will not advertise here at ArticleCast, but I do advertise at Midwest Sports Fans and this plugin has been an absolute revelation. The plugin enables you to insert ad code inline in posts and pages, as well as in your sidebars. It makes AdSense so much easier to incorporate into the overall design and layout of a blog, and ultimately should result in a higher click-through because of the seamless integration into posts and pages.

WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin for WordPress

5: Platinum SEO Pack – I just found this one earlier this week and immediately decided to replace All-in-One SEO Pack on all of my sites. All-in-One SEO Pack is good, but needs to be used in conjunction with the Robots Meta plugin to ensure proper Robots tags. Platinum SEO has everything in one easy, intuitive form in the post writing interface.

Platinum SEO Pack Plugin for Wordpress

[tags]wordpress, wordpress plugins, word press, blogging[/tags]