I’m beautiful like me.

One of the reasons I moved over to WordPress was to get CommentLuv. What a great concept! It is by and far my favorite plug-in. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog and don’t use CommentLuv, than you are just a big, fat meanie! To further spread the link love, I have used the NOFF plug-in so that when you do leave a comment, you get a link that follows back to your site. This is what it is all about! I Follow! I got these two plug-ins immediately after installing WordPress.

More recently, I have found a most excellent plug-in: Micro*Kid’s Related Posts Plug-in. It’s ridiculously easy to use and looks quite fabulous, too. It does not find related posts automatically, so I have had to go back and edit some of my posts to link them to related posts, but it was worth the effort, particularly that it reciprocates (link Post A to Post B, Post B is automatically linked back to Post A as related).

I also use the All-in-One SEO Pack. It’s a great way to add meta tags to single posts. I won’t swear to results from this plug-in, but then I haven’t done the research yet.

To tackle the never-ending spam problem, I use Spam Karma 2. It’s done a pretty good job so far, only harvesting one comment that wasn’t spam, but caught every actual spam comment. I know everyone loves Akismet ’round these parts, but it required getting a key and I read that some folks were having issues with that in the Global Dashboard. Best avoid that problem altogether, thanks.

Other great plug-ins I use:

• Feedburner Feedsmith
• Google Analyticator
• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator
• Liz Strauss Comment Counter
• ShareThis
• Subscribe to Comments 2.1
• Several plug-ins created by Lester Chan

It wasn’t easy finding good plug-ins for WordPress 2.6, since it’s still fairly new. A lot of plug-ins creators haven’t had time or opportunity to update their plug-ins. Too bad for me, since there are a number of them I have my eyes on!