the air

I’ve gotten a few requests to talk about the current plugins I use for my blog since its redesign. I guess some people were correct in assuing that I have been busy adding and removing plugins to better suit my blog. I am currently running about 25 different plugins to help provide a better experience for all you readers. Since I have so many plugins, I am going to split up this post across multiple posts.

Part I will talk about the following plugins:

• Advanced Search Lite
• Akismet
• All In One SEO Pack
• Blogstats PCC

Advanced Search Lite

You see that search box at the top of the right column? That’s the plugin in action. By default, most WordPress themes can harness the power of the search functions built into WordPress. However, by many means, that search function is ok and nothing exceptional. This little plugin is able to improve on that search function by finding posts that contain the actual word(s) you are searching for and highlighting those terms throughout the posts. This is one of those plugins I wanted to implement to improve my blog with its new look. I’m not sure how many people use the search function on my blog, but I can bet that this small improvement definitely helps.

Akismet

Ok, if you’re blog is NOT running this plugin then you really need to reconsider your decision. This is basically a spam filter for all the comments on any blog. The plugin is actually very good at what it does and I consider it a de-facto standard for any blog. If I’m not mistaken, this is one of those “default” plugins included with every WordPress installation. If your blog does not have this plugin, make sure you have another solution handy or go for this plugin and get things in order and stop comment spam NOW!

All In One SEO Pack

I learned about this plugin from John Chow. In all honesty, this is definitely a must-have plugin if you have monetized your blog or are trying to improve your ranking on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. It also helps keep your posts relevant to a variety of search terms and could potentially help others find your content through search engines more reliably. Since my blog is not part of a niche topic, I don’t see myself using this plugin quite often, but I do think that it is a good plugin to have. You can easily manipulate the meta tags and title of your post (the title that appears at the top of the browser) for each post and your blog as a whole. Give it a shot if you are serious about blogging and making money.

Blogstats PCC

This plugin is actually more for authors who would like to display certain statistics about their blog to visitors. It has the ability to display:

• total number of posts
• total number of comments
• and much more

I typically use this plugin just to display the total number of posts on my blog in the left column under Port of Air. I think it’s pretty sad that I use a plugin to do just that, but once I decide to remove the total number of posts, I may go ahead and delete that plugin. In my opinion, this plugin is not really necessary.

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