WordPress plugins which I use on this blog

2009-03-04T18:23:00+01:00

Cliff Brake asked me which plugins I use on my blog for spam protection. I decided to write about all plugins which I use here.

Widgets

First part would be widgets which are used in sidebars:

Configurable Tag Cloud — I had my own one but needed more functionality
Feedburner Widget — tells how many readers my blog has via RSS readers. Not always sensible value ;)
Popularity Contest Widget — lists popular posts
Hrw Meta widget — no links to RSS, checks for WP/WPMU and give proper link

Spam related

I used Spam Karma 2 before but it is not maintained anymore. Now I use simpler ones:

Yawasp - Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin — mangle names of comment fields and adds some automatically changed one to protect me from spambots
ClearSpam — removes spam comments from database

Statistics

“Do not believe in statistics which you did not faked” or what to use to track visitors:

Google Analytics for WordPress — real monster
WordPress.com Stats — simple one but available in dashboard

Content related

Markdown Extra — this should be part of WP core — no need to remember HTML as simpler markup is available
Popularity Contest — gives informations which posts are still the most read one. Great when widget is used.
SRG Clean Archives — powers Archives page. Very heavily modified by me with most of features removed.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin — adds link to “probably related” posts at the end of each post
Recommended Tags — recommends tags in post editor. Modified by me — will release my version one day.
Tag Managing Thing — another rarely used plugin which helps to manage tags
Scissors — simple editing of uploaded images
Slimbox Plugin — nice popups of images

Other

Contact Form — I use it on Contact page
OpenID — adds possibility to use blog as OpenID server (also supports OpenID login to blog)
WP Super Cache — just in case of Digg effect

Theme

OK, theme is not a plugin :D I use plaintxtblog by Scott with few modifications.

neverending spam problem

2005-11-17T13:01:00+01:00

Spam… who does not get it in INBOX.. I get a lot of spam each day — one day I got 70MiB of spam and because of that I started to use bogofilter. It does his work well — I trained it with over 1GiB of spam from my collection and it rarely gives me ‘false positives’.

But KMail which I used as MUA run bogofilter synchronously so when I try to get mail I have it frozen for few minutes. Maybe it’s time to switch to old times scheme and use fetchmail+maildrop to fetch/filter mails…

Marcin Juszkiewicz - spam