So a handful of friends have asked me what I use to blog and how this blog is setup. I pretty much setup all my blogs the same way, using Wordpress as a base, then installing several plug-ins into the Wordpress system to make it more available, linked, and integrated with my other tools such as Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook.
To start i’ve installed Wordpress 2.9.2. The plug-ins I’ve added are the following:
- all-in-one-seo-pack – this handles all the SEO functions you need for any Wordpress install. It sets up your title tags, meta description.
- amazon-product-ads – if you’re planning to be an Amazon Affiliate, this plug-in setups up a widget that allows you to display a product in the side panel that is related to the content of the page
- delicious-for-wordpress – this sets up a widget that pulls content from your delicious account for display on a side panel
- disqus-comment-system – Disqus is an online centralized commenting system that makes it easier for you to moderate content for several blogs.
- feedburner-plugin - Feedburner is a service that allows you to track and advertise on your rss feed. this plug-in redirects your RSS feed to a Feedburner feed.
- google-analytics-for-wordpress – this is probably the most crucial plug-in for your metrics. Google Analytics allows you to track and learn more about your readers. This plug-in integrates the service into your blog
- google-sitemap-generator – this generates a site-map for your blog, which is crucial to spreading your content out to the search engines. check out http://www.google.com/webmastertools for more information on site-maps.
- kb-advanced-rss-widget – this widget allows you to pull and display any RSS content from any source on the web
- share-this – share-this is a service that allows your users to share your content with several social services such as Digg, Mixx, Stumbleupon, and Reddit.
- similar-posts – this plugin creates a widget that is shows the user what other posts on your blog are related to the current post
tweetmeme – displays the number of times your article has been re-tweeted on the web
twitter-for-wordpress – this plug-in integrates all your blog with your Twitter account, tweeting all the latest posts from your blog and vice versa.
w-cache – wp-cache is a plug-in that caches the content of your blog, so that a database call isn’t made every time. this dramatically increases the performance of your blog
wp-tags-to-technorati – this is a plug-in that setups up Technorati tags on your blog, so that it can be picked up by the blog search engine.
whew! if you have any other questions, feel free to shoot me an email. also, if there are other plug-ins I missed, please feel free to talk about them in the comments.
