WordPress is by its nature a free application available at no charge and worls well “straight out of the box” but the great thing about WordPress is that you can download plugins that add functionality to WordPress that does everything from making life easier to increasing security. Almost all are free and i thought the best way i could say thank you is with a bit of link love for the plugins i currently use:

Akismet - Akismet is an anti spam plugin that checks comments against their web service to see if they look like spam or not. Its free for most users although i pay a monthly subscription charge for my use of it.

Antispam Collateral Condolences - notifies visitors when their comment is caught as spam

Bad Behavior - Bad Behavior is dynamite against spam bots. It denies them access to your website and prevents them leaving their comments. At the time of writing this post this plugin stopped 5408 bots from ever reaching my blog in the last week

Dofollow - When leaving comments on the default wordpress blog setup, the commentor’s link is inserted into the blog with a “no follow” tag which means search engines ignore the link to their website for ranking purposes. With Dofollow the situation is reversed and commentors get the link love they deserve.

FeedWordPress - FeedWordPress works by checking subscribed feeds for new entries and if there are any then it publishes them to the blog which is how i publish the ad free version of this site

FD Feedburner Plugin - by default WordPress produces its own RSS feeds for the whole blog and by category. There are however many advantages to allowing feedburner to manage your feeds instead. FD Feedburner Plugin redirects visitors to the feedburner address automatically which saves having some subscribers on one feed and some on the other. Feedburner just adopted the plugin and renamed it to FeedSmith but i haven’t found the need to update at this stage.

Google Sitemaps - Google Sitemaps works by automatically creating a google compliant sitemap of your blog and notifying google that its been published or updated. This means any pages you write are quickly and easily inserted into the google index.

Livejournal Crossposter - The Livejournal Crossposter does exactly what it says, it automatically cross posts everything i write here into my livejournal. Anyone wanting to comment there is brought back to this blog to comment

Subscribe2 - Subscribe2 notifies an email list when entries are posted to the blog allowing people to subscribe via email.

Subscribe To Comments - Subscribe to comments works by allowing people who leave a comment on any entry to receive via email any follow up comments automatically - no more having to check back at the actual blog

Text Link Ads - Text Link Ads is an advertising program. Advertisers will pay big money for a text link from sites with the higher the ranking the more they pay. Its my favourite advertising program as it just sits there and earns. Advertisers sign up and its all dealt with automatically.

WP-Cron - WP Cron allows you to set up other plugins automatically on a periodic basis without the need to set up a cron job on your server

WP-Cron Dashboard - WP-Cron Dashboard works with WP-Cron to automatically update the WordPress Dashboard

WP-Cron Future Pings - this again works with WP-Cron to ping update services (like technorati and weblogs.com) when future dated posts are published.

WWW Redirect - most websites will work whether you type in WWW or not (eg everybody-knows.com or www.everybody-knows.com) - WWW Redirect redirects the variations to the same end address.

So a big thanks to the plugin authors who create and maintain the plugins.