Jason Hasselkus

After starting my blog and looking through the various plugins available for Wordpress, I’ve come across a few I feel a blogger can’t live without.

Sociable

Since blogs are for the community and sharing information with this community, why not have a way to make the sharing of posts with others on various social bookmarking sites. This is what Sociable allows you to do! Sociable version 1.2 allows you, with the click of a link, to notify the social bookmarking sites located at the end of this post.

Subscribe Me

Glance to the right of my blog and you’ll see a section at the top that says “Syndicate”. This is the plugin for Subscribe me. What’s nice about this, is that if you want to increase your readership, this is the way to do it. Robert Scoble subscribes to thousands of blogs, all of which he uses syndication to get notified of new content. As of this writting, the following types of syndication were supported: RSS Feed, Bloglines, MyYahoo, Google Reader, MyMSN, MyAOL, Rojo, FeedLounge, Newsgator, Netvibes. There is even a really nice help option you can include to help those who aren’t exactly sure how to use a feed.

FAlbum

For those of us lucky enough to have a flickr account, and a need to share your photos, you can’t live without this plugin. Here’s the deal, you add this little bit of code to, lets say the sidebar, and poof, your images are there. What’s nice is there are many ways to style the section, and various ways to configure it to your liking. If you have a need to share image data, then this is the way to go.

SimpleTags

With Technorati tags being about the hottest way to get your tags noticed on the world wide web, this is a plugin you can’t overlook. Basically you add a technorati tag to the bottom of your post for the tags to get noticed by the technorati engine. It’s really that simple. Not only does it allow you to tag the whole post, but it allows you to tag individual words or phrases directly in the post. It’s a bit manual, but doesn’t take that long to do once you get the hang of it.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back with some more plugins that make a world of difference to your blog. But for now, practice with these and let me know what you think. I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to enhance my blog, so send me your feedback and help others learn to blog better.