Would you believe this blog is almost 2 years old?
I do find that hard to believe. I thought for sure I would get bored and forget about it after the first 3 months. But sure enough, I checked the archives over on the right side of the screen and it says my first post was July 2008.
I thought it was interesting that in all of my years of blogging (ok, next month I can officially say “years”) I haven’t really written anything for other bloggers to help them get started with their own blogs. I guess it’s because I still don’t consider myself a real “blogger” but after 2 years and lots of positive feedback I guess I must be doing something right.
A few days ago someone emailed me looking for help setting up a new blog. They bought a domain, installed WordPress, and picked out a theme. Now the adventure begins as they try to figure out what to with their blog.
I thought I would share some of the suggestions I am making to him by posting them here on my blog so everyone can benefit from them.
So, first up… plugins! I love plugins. They are what makes WordPress so awesome. Here are the list of plugin I have installed on my blog:
Akismet – Essential spam blocker. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
All in One Adsense and YPN – Inserts Adsense or YPN code in to your blog posts.
All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
RSS Power Plus – This plugin will, when a new post is published, submit the rss feed for this post only (not the entire domains feed) to the configured RSS Aggregators websites, including where applicable the tags used in the post.
SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.
Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.
Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
TweetMyBlog! – Updates your twitter account with each new post to your blog.
Tweet This – Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs. Can automatically tweet new and scheduled blog posts. Highly customizable.
Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.
WordPress Plugin Alternatives – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks.
WP Auto Tagger – Automatically finds tags based on your post content.
Got any other suggestions? Feel free to post them in the comments.