Plugins
Favorite Firefox Plugins:
Google Toolbar
This is the Google toolbar. It is a nice one to have, and you can enable PageRank right there on the toolbar.
Mouse Gestures
This is a fun one, but by no means necessary. In fact, some of you might find it outright annoying. Basically what it does is it allows you to use your mouse to make specific, pre-designed movements that cause the browser to do certain functions like Back, New Window, etc. I really like it. Give it a try, if all else fails you can turn it off.
FireGestures
This is another gestures program. I’m using this on my laptop and Mouse Gestures on a desktop, but as time goes on I think I’m liking FireGestures more than Mouse Gestures. Same basic idea though.
del.icio.us
For this one you have to sign up for an account with del.icio.us. Once you are in your account, click on Help. In the Help section you should be able to find a topic about the Firefox plugin. It allows you to tag websites from your toolbar area rather than opening up your del.icio.us account in another browser.
HTML Validator
For those of you that are a more into coding your own site rather than using a site builder, you’ll want to get the HTML Validator. It will tell you what errors or warnings you have in your code, and by using the Tidy feature will clean it up for you as best it can.
SEO for FireFox
This plugin is from Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com. Pretty cool tool that let’s you see all sorts of SEO related data when doing searches.
StumbleUpon Toolbar
The StumbleUpon toolbar! Much like the one for del.icio.us, but for StumbleUpon!
FireBug
I’ve grown to really love this plugin. It let’s you hover over a page and see what the different divs are so you can then go into the code and make the changes to the CSS and HTML to make your site look the way you want. I use this plugin all the time when i’m customizing a site.
TwitterFox
TwitterFox let’s you manage your Twitter account from a little pop-up box in your browser. You can also change back and forth between accounts if you have different ones. It will keep track of your most recent updates, replies, and direct messages. Great if you’re a Twitter user!
RankChecker
Another great tool from SEOBook.com. This one will let you type in a domain and a keyword and tell you where that site ranks for that phrase on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. You can also save lists of keywords that you check frequently.
SearchStatus
This one will let you see the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and/or Compete Rank as a small button rather than using the Google Toolbar, Alexa Toolbar, etc. I just use it for PageRank rather than using the full Google Toolbar.
Favorite WordPress Plugins:
Math Comment Spam Protection
You’ll see this plugin being used on this blog with all of the comment boxes. It puts in a little math problem that the commenter has to answer in order to leave a comment. This helps to block a ton of spam.
Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam
I like this spam protection better than the Math one, but they both work great. The cool thing about Peter’s plugin is that it lets you choose what words are used in the verification box! I prefer this one over the Math one above.
Mighty AdSense
Great plugin for managing your AdSense ads.
Adsense
Lately I’ve been using this plugin more than Mighty AdSense. This plugin also makes it easy to manage your AdSense ads, but you can also choose not to use them on a post if you want to.
Related Posts
This plugin will put links to other posts that are of a similar topic at the bottom of the current post.
Sociable
Ads the little social media buttons at the bottom of the post for sharing things socially.
WP-Amazon
This plugin makes it very easy to add Amazon products to your site.
Do Follow
This plugin removes the “nofollow” attribute from links in your comments. A great way to actually allow people to create valid backlinks from your site.
Comment Email Responder
This is a nice little plugin that makes it very easy for you to send an email back to someone that left a comment on your blog. You just go to the actual blog post (logged in as the administrator of course), click on the little icon next to the commenter’s name, and then type in your own reply comment. Your comment plus a quote of their comment will be emailed to the commenter. Great way to make sure people get your response!
WordPress Thread Comment
I LOVE this plugin! I only started using it a few weeks ago, but what it allows you to do is reply to someone else’s comment and the reply stays inside the original comment. Great for conversations. It will also email the reply to the person you commented back to if you want it to, thus getting rid of the need for the Comment Email Responder plugin. It seems though that some themes don’t work well with this one.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
This handy little plugin creates a sitemap for your blog. If you look at my Articles page you will see this plugin at work.
Favicon Manager
A Favicon is the little icon that you see next to the URL of a website in the address bar (mine looks like this: 
Google Sitemaps
Just like it says, this plugin creates a Google Sitemap for your blog.
Leprakauns Word Count
This will let you count the number of words in your post as you’re writing it. It saves you from having to use Word or counting by hand (I hope you don’t still do this 
). This plugin is no longer necessary if you’re using the newer version of WordPress.
All in One SEO Pack
Just like it says. This plugin lets you do titles and meta tags. Great for SEO.
WP-PostRatings
I don’t use this one on this blog, but what it does is you can let people give your blog posts a 1-5 star rating. I’m sure some of you could find fun use for this. The link to this one includes a bunch of other plugins, you just have to scroll down to find it if you want to download it.
TwitterTools
This will make it so that you can show your most recent Twitter updates on your sidebar. You can also set it up so that when you write a new post it is automatically sent to Twitter.
Apture
I love Apture! Apture is a plugin that allows you to add extra multimedia to your website from places like Flickr, YouTube, etc. by just highlighting words on the page and inserting the link. It’s all Javascript, but pretty darn cool. Check out their site for a demo of how it works.
Ad Rotator
This is a very simple plugin that will let you set up rotating ads where ever you insert it.
Exec-PHP
This is more of an advanced plugin, but can be really useful if you need to do some more advanced things with your blog. This plugin will make it so that you can actually use PHP code in your posts, which is something that the normal WordPress editors will not let you do. But use with caution!
Lijit
Lijit is a more advanced search feature for your blog. It allows people to not only search your blog, but also your social networks and sites you’ve bookmarked on places like delicious and StumbleUpon as well.
