The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

Been busy fixing www.downloadmunkey.net and thoo2.net last week. Somehow I exceeded Photobucket’s 25GB bandwidth limit last month, resulting in most images on my previous site to randomly disappear for the last few days.

As a result, I switched to a Wordpress site at Dreamhost.com. You can get your own at 22.40 USD/~33SGD for 1 domain registration + hosting for 1 year with promocode DOWNLOADMUNKEY

While fiddling with the Wordpress configuration, I downloaded quite a few plugins and I’ve compiled a list of useful ones that I’m using. I believe that Akismet should be compulsory for any Wordpress site and so doesn’t count in this list

1. Subscribe To Comments – IMHO the most important plugin to install. Allowing readers to subscribe to your comments makes it much easier to follow conversations. To place the “Subscribe to comments via email” checkbox above the Submit button, check out Derek Punsalan’s post at 5ThirtyOne.
2. FeedBurner FeedSmith – For redirecting your Wordpress RSS feeds to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track readership and other stats.
3. Global Translator – Allows your readers to translate your English site to Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish via Google Translation, Promt or Babelfish with a single click.
4. Exec-PHP – Handy for running PHP code in text widgets like those visual plugins which do not come as widgets but as code that you have to manually insert into the PHP templates e.g Global Translator.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – Create a XML sitemap for submission to search engines like Google or Yahoo!
6. WP-PostViews – Allows you to show the number of views for a post. Somehow I enjoy seeing 0 views in the posts all over this site Comes with an additional widget to show the top 10 most viewed posts in your sidebar.
7. Dean’s Permalinks Migration – I realized I preferred the date and name based permalink structure like Blogger’s permalink structure over the default Wordpress permalink structure (e.g ?p=123) a few days after I set the site to go ‘live’. This nifty plugin allows both internal and external links using the older permalink structure to redirect correctly and seamlessly to the new location.

Also check out these two useful lists of plugins and widgets compiled @ eJabs.com and debbiewhoelse.com that I found while searching for useful plugins.