New Plugins Added

I’ve recently been updating a number of the sites I look after to bring more services to them and make them a little more self administrating.
To this end, I’ve been gravitating toward some of the WordPress articles I’ve seen sitting in my RSS reader as well as those which come through my twitter stream.

One of there articles of note was “24 plugins that I currently use on my blog and why you should use them too” and, while I don’t use all of the plugins Marko uses, it was nice to have some I do use validated by their appearance in Markos list. It was also a new perspective on ‘useful functionality’, many of which I hadn’t previously considered.

To that end, I’ve recently added:

• CSS Compress – Which essentially removes comments and unnecessary ‘stuff’ from the code which makes up a published page
• Referrer Detector – Which is designed to use the referrer content in the incoming HTTP connection, and display a relevant greeting to the visitor
• MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Apparently there’s all sorts of “Really Bad Things(TM)” that can happen if you’re like me and end up re-editing posts after they are published (because of spelling/grammatical mistakes et. al.) which can end up getting your domain blocked by some ping update services.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This will look at a posts categories, tags, title and content – then try and find other articles you’ve written which may be similar, suggesting them as further reading at the bottom of each article.

So – I’ll be test driving these here on Rob the Geek for a while, if they prove useful then I’ll look to add them to my other sites.

By the way – I’m LOVING the new WordPress 2.7 dashboard – adding new plugins is soo much easier now I don’t need to fire up an FTP client.