Thank a Plugin Developer Day
Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress and skipper of Automattic, has declared today, January 28, “Thank a Plugin Developer” Day. In thanks, I will list all of the plugins I use in my firsttube.com Wordpress install.
- Akismet is a comment filter that uses a “karma” type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. According to my internal stats, Akismet reports 37,512 spams caught, 284 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.934%. Not too shabby. As a result, this site no longer has a captcha.
- Blip.It iPhone Handler is a neat little tool that creates a method to display embedded flash as Quicktime on-the-fly, ideal for iPhone compatibility.
- Cache Images, another Mullenweg gem, let me fetch remote images and store them locally. I prefer to host all images locally if possible, so this is fantastic.
- “ftBlogrollerWP (ft)” is my own modified plugin that creates a page with all of my links, as seen here.
- Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless.
- Limit Login Attempts. No sense in letting someone hammer your Wordpress admin login eternally. Basic security that ought to be part of Wordpress core.
- Similar Posts is a snazzy little plugin that tries to find similar posts to any given post. I use this on each post’s page. In pre-Wordpress firsttube, I did this by searching for other articles with the same tags. In Wordpress-era ft, I do this via a plugin. Similar Posts requires the Post-Plugin Library.
- Tangofy is a simple plugin to modify icons in the stock Wordpress admin pages.
- TTFTitles is a sweet little plugin that creates images from text. I do this on entry titles and sidebar titles. It allows you to add a dimension of professional typography and to use fonts that aren’t in the eight “web safe.”
- WordPress Database Backup: you’ll never guess what this one does!
- WordPress Hashcash does the spam filtering in conjunction with Akismet. Whatever Akismet misses, Hashcash catches. Essentially, it catches *everything* Akismet misses and only really reports problems when users have javascript turned off.
- Wordpress Popular Posts provide me view counts, plain and simple. I used to keep track pre-Wordpress, but sadly, I lost my hit count (many of which were in the thens of thousands of views) and only started again this month. Nonetheless, it’s in the sidebar.
- wp-cache is a caching program, but I’m not currently using the cache.
- WP-Lytebox automatically adds a lytebox effect to inline images, which is spectacular.
- WP-Optimize is a database optimizer that does optimization not only of MySQL overhead, but also removes autosaves and other space wasters from your database.
- WP-Syntax makes my code pretty, and that’s all.
- WP iPaper is a plugin for embedding scribd stuff.
- Lastly, WPtouch iPhone Theme is a stylesheet that makes this site look native on the iPhone. It’s truly a beautiful skin.
That is all. Thank you to all the above developers. As a reward, please accept this pingback!
