I have recently started paying more attention to this blog than in the past. In the course of things I have come across three plugins that have delivered immediate utility.
In the first instance: Akismet – spam filter. You WILL be spammed. Some cretin will without a doubt set a bot loose on your blog, and the comment spam will start trickling in…Akismet will stop most of it, dead. And it allows you to review comments marked as spam – something you cannot do “out of the box”.
Secondly – All In One SEO pack. It knows the stuff about Search Engine Optimisation that you do not want to know, and now do not have to know either. The web site contains a tutorial video. But using the plugin is easy – fill in all the boxes, and watch the googlebots swarm your site 
And speaking of “watch” – you need Wassup to help you analyse realtime traffic, and track visitors as they navigate your site. The plugin is really useful – I have even noticed from the traffic analysis a number of whois queries coming to my site. These queries were for domain names I own..which in turn made me realise that a potential market exists for some of these domains.
These three plugins have contributed a great deal to the pleasure and utility I get out of WordPress, and I would recommend them to anyone who is interested in understanding and promoting usage patterns on their blog.
Feel free to ping me in the comments if you need help using any of these plugins.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Craig // Aug 27, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I will tag you for help as and when I try use these plugins.
Have you played with buddypress?
2 JvN // Aug 27, 2008 at 5:23 pm
@Craig – haven’t played with buddypress – it works with WP MU far as I know, which is not as feature-rich as standard WP. We use MU for internal logging in the team, but the standard version is much better for this kind of blog.
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