TechNayak

I have been blogging for about three years now, started here in Nov of 2005. But, the day I saw wordpress, was the day my blogging actually took shape. After a controversial blogpost saw a lot of activity on my personal blog, I decided to share some of the plugins that I think helped complete my blogging experience.

First and fore most you need to to get Wordpress. Wait for 2.7, its awesome, with Quickiepress and customizable screens, blogging will never be the same again. If you dont own your own site, then get a wordpress subdomain. Though such a step will mean you wont be able to use most of what I write about next. Good, now lets get some plugins :

1. Akismet : I think this is shipped with wordpress by default but is seriously one plugin that you need. Its stopped nearly 50,000 spam comments.

2. Adsense- deluxe : Manage ads in your Wordpress posts by using simple shortcuts to insert different types of ads. Really useful for people displaying ads ( multiple ads ) on a post.

3. Comment-email-responder : This plugin lets the author reply to a comment via mail if the user has provided his/her mail id. Its useful as it drives the discussion forward and also is a way to bring people back for a good discussion.

4. Syntax highlighter : Syntax highlighter is an awesome plugin for developers. Most developers end up writing some code on their blogs and lets admit it, code is not so elegantly displayed on most blogging engines. Syntax highlighter make code look really pretty on you blog. It supports C++ (cpp, c, c++), C# (c#, c-sharp, csharp), CSS (css), Delphi (delphi, pascal), Java (java), Java Script (js, jscript, javascript), PHP (php) Python (py, python), Ruby (rb, ruby, rails, ror), Sql (sql),VB (vb, vb.net),XML/HTML (xml, html, xhtml, xslt). Take a look at this section of code.

 # python's functional programming support is awesome
 # you can use three functions map, reduce and filter

 # map(function, sequence) calls function(item) for each of the sequence's items
 #returns a list of the return values

  >>> map(lambda x: x*x*x, range(1, 11))
  [1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000]

 #reduce(function, sequence) returns a single value by performing tree based reduction on f(item)
 #For example, to compute the sum of the numbers 1 through 10: 

 >>> reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, range(1, 11))
  55

5. Google-Analytics plugin : This plugin lets you put your adsense code in a single place without having to edit any of the files. If you are using analytics for your blog then get this plugin, makes the job hasslefree.

6. Subscribe to comments: I subscribe to comments feed for a post when I am interested in a discussion, but for users who dont want to take the pain of managing rss, you can give them an option to follow further comments by email. Its great to drive a good discussion again.

Well thats about it, have fun blogging!!