I often wonder what plug-ins other bloggers are using, so I thought it would be fun to add a page with some technical information about my blog, my preferred theme, and the plug-ins and widgets I am using.

First, I'm using the Atahualpa Theme created by Bytes for All.  When Ms. Crafty helped me migrate my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress blog I knew how I wanted my blog to look and spent hours looking for just the right theme.  I narrowed it down to another one, and Atahualpa.  I asked Ms. Crafty which she thought I should go with, and she thought Atahualpa would be best since it had so many customizable options.  I have been very happy with Atahualpa and in fact use it at another blog.  I highly recommend it.

I'll list my plug-ins in alphabetical order. My personal comments are after a series of periods ……… :

BEHIND THE SCENES PLUG-INS

• Akismet By Matt Mullenweg | Visit plugin site. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” ……… Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration.
• All-in-One SEO Pack By Michael Torbert | Visit plugin site. Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. ……… Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration.
• Custom Post Limits | By Scott Reilly | Visit plugin site. Control the number of posts that appear on the front page, search results, and author, category, tag, and date archives, independent of each other, including specific archives. ……… This plug-in was recommended to me by SVB at The Digerati Life.
• Display Widgets | By Stephanie Wells | Visit plugin site. Adds check boxes to each widget to show or hide on site pages (or by category). ………  My review for this awesome plug-in is here.
• Feedburner Feedsmith By FeedBurner | Visit plugin site Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. ……… Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration. ……… I recommended that Mrs. Money over at Ultimate Money blog install this plug-in since her RSS feed numbers were so ridiculously low (have you seen the comments that girl gets?!) and her numbers shot up within a couple days.
• Google XML Sitemaps By Arne Brachhold | Visit plugin site. 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. ……… This plug-in generates the XML sitemap that you need to link to Google Webmaster Tools.
• Maintain Blogger Permalinks | By Justin Watt | Visit plugin site. ……… Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration. That way I didn't have to change all my blogger links to other posts!
• My Category Order  | By Andrew Charlton | Visit plugin site Allows you to set the order in which categories will appear in the sidebar. Uses a drag and drop interface for ordering. Adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes. ……… Atahualpa recommends this plug-in within the theme options area.
• NoFollow Free | By Michele Marcucci | Visit plugin site Remove the nofollow tag from your blog's comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc. Supports multilingual and a Top Commenters sidebar Widget. ………  Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration.
• Permalink Finder by Keith Graham. Installed 3-22-10. My blog was migrated from Blogger and I have to refresh my .htaccess file whenever I do an upgrade to WordPress.  I keep forgetting and then I have broken links.  And then I forget that I need to refresh the .htaccess file. Tonight I remembered, but the .htaccess file that I was given to use wouldn't work and I broke my blog. I just about have a fit when that happens (when I break my blog). Anyway I went on a hunt to find something to stop this from happening and this plug-in looks for two similar words from the original URL before going to the 404 error page. So far it is working great.
• PostPost  | By Douglas Karr | Visit plugin site. A plugin for users who wish to customize the content before and after every post on their blog and in their feed or in their pages. ……… Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration. This is how I get my “Mrs. Accountability” image of my signature to follow each post, and also where I put the Print button.
• Smart YouTube  | By Vladimir Prelovac | Visit plugin site. Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization. ……… For some unknown reason, I could not get Atahualpa to let me embed a YouTube video. Then I found this plug-in that does it like magic.
• WhyDoWork Adsense  | By Whydowork | Visit plugin site. Insert Adsense code in your pages without modifying the template. Show different ads for articles older than 7 days (or as old as you wish). ……… I really like this plug-in because it allows me to position my Adsense ads so easily and also I like that I can put different ads on older posts.
• WordPress.com Stats | By Andy Skelton | Visit plugin site. Stats Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. ……… This is a fun plug-in because it tells me that a LOT more people are actually visiting than Google Analytics would ever admit. LOL. And it doesn't count my own visits to the site, either.  This is also a tool I use to catch when people are linking to my site that I otherwise may not have noticed and can go on over and visit and give them a thank you and say howdy.
• WordPress Database Backup  | By Austin Matzko | Visit plugin site. On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started. ……… Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration. I am so thankful for this plug-in because it makes backing up my database that much easier.  Ms. Crafty says I should also make regular backups of the entire folder in which my blog resides, downloading by FTP because I guess this database only holds the actual data, not all the pretty stuff and the theme, etc.
• WordPress Thread Comment  | By 偶爱偶家 | Visit plugin site. WP Thread Comment allow user can reply comment and same comment On display, can choose ajax or not. ……… Recommended to me by Mrs. Money over at Ultimate Money Blog.
• WP Sticky  | By Lester ‘GaMerZ' Chan | Visit plugin site Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress's blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler. ……… Atahualpa has its own sticky post version, but I like this one because it has a few more options.
• WP-Table Reloaded  | By Tobias Bäthge | Visit plugin site | Plugin Page. This plugin allows you to create and easily manage tables in the admin-area of WordPress. A comfortable backend allows an easy manipulation of table data. You can then include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML. ……… I use this if I ever need to embed a table in a post.

PLUG-INS VISIBLE ON THE BLOG

• Contact Form 7  | By Takayuki Miyoshi | Visit plugin site.  Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible. ……… Easy to set up and understand.
• SexyBookmarks  | By Josh Jones, Jamie Carter, Gautum Gupta, Norman Yung | Visit plugin site. Adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. ……… Couldn't figure out what the name of this plug-in was, but finally Brad Chaffee of Enemy of Debt was able to clue me in.
• Subscribe to Comments  | By Mark Jaquith | Visit plugin site. Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess ……… I'm pretty sure Mr. Crafty set this one up for me.
• Top Commentators Widget | By Lorna Timbah (WebGrrrl.net) | Visit plugin site. Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin. ……… Started using this because of a podcast I listened to by Neil Patel, he says he always uses one of these to generate comments from his visitors.
• WP Greet Box  | By Thaya Kareeson | Visit plugin site Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins. ……… I started using this so I could try to get some of my Google visitors to stick around and visit again.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plug-In  | By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) | Visit plugin site. Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display. ………  Ms. Crafty recommended and installed this plug-in when she did my blog migration.