I’ve recently been using Akismet as my spam plugin for Wordpress. It had been doing great, until this weekend. All of a sudden, spam started piling up and I was kept busy trying to remove it all. It’s amazing how great spam plugins do work, when they work. I ended up turning on Spam Karma for a while and that fixed everything.

It turns out that Akismet was down over the weekend for some updates. All should be good now though.

It really makes a person realize how great spam plugins are.  Maybe it’s time to donate a few bucks.

[tags]akismet,spam-karma[/tags]

Wordpress is great, but the default install isn’t as good as it could be. There are hundreds, if not thousands of Wordpress plugins available. Finding ones that work well and add to your site’s optimization can be tricky, but here is what I recommend.

1. Akismet or Spam Karma - Both plugins block spammers from automatically filling your comments with spam and links to unwanted sites. An anti-spam plugin is a must unless you like spending hours a day cleaning up after spammers.
2. Optimal Title - This simple plugin re-writes the blog post’s tile start with the post name not the site name. It’s best to always start title tags with unique information and then proceed to generic.
3. WWW Redirect - Technically, http://www.site.com and http://site.com are two different sites. It may be a minor deal to some search engines, but you are always better off making sure that you are only giving out one URL structure. This plugin redirects the non-www version to the www version, or vice versa, with a friendly 301 redirect.

Now I know that that’s a small list, but I feel those three are on my must have list. I’ll be following up with posts on should have plugins, usability plugins and fun plugins in the upcoming weeks.