Over at ProBlogger, Darren Rowse asked his community, “What are your favourite FREE WordPress Plugins?”
With more time than sense on my hands, I compiled a list of the 183 unique WordPress Plugins which commenters mentioned:
The Top 10
How I totaled it up.
Pasted the comments into an Excel spreadsheet, and removed all the non-recommendations.
Then I matched the plugin name to the plugin home page (mostly the WordPress plugin sites).
Next I tidied up the various spellings people used.
Finally, I did a pivot table in Excel, and here we are.
The other 173
(Click here to continue reading The most popular FREE WordPress Plugins according to ProBlogger users.)
I’ve been dissatisfied with the Echo commenting plug-in for WordPress for a while now.
The latest-but-last gripe has been with Echo performance. It adds up to 3 seconds to the blog page load time. And it can’t be fixed by any tweaks on Wisefaq.com. Tweaks such as enabling Gzip compression. which I can’t [...]
Use the WP Super Cache plugin. In the case of Wisefaq.com, pages load three times quicker with it. JErm asked in the comments for the “Make it go faster – Enabling GZip Compression”
How does this relate to WP-Super-Cache usage? Can they work hand-in-hand to make your site load even faster?
Yes they [...]
This was originally a post at Laffers.net, but I’m getting constant timeouts to that site, so I’m going to repost it here, just in case Laffers.net has gone down. This copy was captured by the Google Cache as it appeared on 24 Dec 2009 04:44:07.
I refer to this article in the following [...]

So you want to move from Blogger to WordPress? I don’t blame you, Blogger has it’s limitations.
The one’s which annoyed me were:
- not being able to use my own domain (wisefaq.com) with Blogger.
(yes, I know there are some hacks you can use, but I didn’t want the world to see my underwear was stamped with Blogger).
- not being to use meta strings.
- lack of support. You’d identify a bug with Blogger, and Blogger support would say that it would be fixed in a ““future”” release.
So I struck out on my own, and have learnt a few things along the way. (Click here to continue reading Things I learnt when migrating from Blogger)
Link Checker is designed to crawl though your blog, verifying that the links you’ve linked to are still there.
Now my utility of choice is Xenu, and I blogged about it here. Not that there is anything wrong with Xenu, I just noticed Link Checker* and thought I’d give it a spin.
So, [...]
It’s been a while since I last published the plugin list used here, so it’s time for an update:
What I’m using now:
All in One SEO Pack
I still use this on the technical posts, as my efforts to use Windows Live Writer to do this, didn’t work. The problem is that you can’t manipulate html directly in Live Writer.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
This sitemap generator creates the Category page.
I use the Category page to: a) find something quickly, and b) see if I’ve miscategorised something.
This plugin works and rarely has an update to it. That’s a good thing, as it means it’s stable.
ECHO by JS-Kit
The replacement commenting plugin I’ve mentioned previously.
Future Calendar
In the WordPress “Posts” option, this plugin tells me what days in the future already has posts. I try and post a few days into the future.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most honest way I’ve got to measure site visits. I tried using AWstats, and you can read about that here: How do I measure thee- … or site stats for dummies.
(Click here to continue reading 11 WordPress Plugins)
Or, Wisefaq now tells your web browser that it’s ok to cache graphics (GIF/PNG/JPG/JPEG/ICO), Javascript and CSS.
“This would be important because??”, you ask.
Well when you visit again, your web browser will use it’s copies of the graphics/Javascript/CSS, instead of downloading them again.
A win for you (speed), and me (bandwidth).
Hooray for us!
So how did I manage this?
Wisefaq sits on an Apache web server. (Click here to continue reading Make it go faster – Expires Headers)
I’ve installed the “ECHO” commenting system by JS-Kit, as I’ve heard good things about it from other people.
Initial impressions?
Little bit confusing to setup. This error is confusing in itself:
The solution is, apparently, is to follow the answer provided in this support post. It doesn’t work for me.
Can I recommend [...]
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