It’s my one year anniversary of moving from Blogger to WordPress.com. So, now I’m moving to WordPress.org. It’s true what they say: WordPress.com is just a gateway platform to the harder stuff.
In fact, I’m all set up to make the shift. I’ve got a domain (which I’ve actually had for a while), I have a server, and WordPress.org has been installed (thanks to Kalev, who rocks). I’m only lacking one magical ingredient: time. This semester is insanely, insanely busy. In addition to my day job, I’m teaching two new courses: the UBC one and one at SFU1 and I’m playing on two hockey teams. Oh yeah, and I’m supposed to be training for a half marathon. So I won’t be making the shift until I get a few minutes to breath2.
In the meantime, I need all you techies to answer this question: What are your favourite WordPress plugins?
Kalev has suggested this one, which, among other things, allows commenters to preview their comments before posting them. What other ones should I get? You know, for when I stop being insanely busy and get a chance to make the jump.
And speaking of being insanely busy, I’ve decided to prorogue my BC Premiers series until after the end of the semester. Writing the BC Premier series postings, which I usually do on Sundays, takes up a fair bit of time since I know pretty much nothing about BC Premiers. Unlike my usually postings where I just blather about whatever is spinning around in my brain, I actually have to read stuff. And I know that I just don’t have time to do that until the semester is over. So I’ve asked the Governor General of my blog3 for a prorogation of the BC Premier series and she has graciously agreed to allow it. Expect the series to start back up in late April, at which time I’ll present a budget.
1Which, mercifully, is online (so I don’t have to go up the mountain) and has a TA (who does tonnes o’ work and also rocks)
2Perhaps over reading break?
3As it turns out, I’m the GG of my own blog. What a lucky coincidence!
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Not To Be Trusted With Knives 
Two I’d recommend are Akismet and WordPress Database Backup. The first checks incoming comments to make sure they aren’t spam and the second automatically backs up your database and sends you a copy of the backup on a regular basis.
* Duane Storey’s WordTwit (sends a tweet whenever you publish a post on your blog) – http://www.bravenewcode.com/wordtwit
* Tyler Ingram’s wpCommentTwit (sends you a DM tweet whenever someone posts a comment on your blog) – http://www.tyleringram.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-wpcommenttwit
Second vote on Akismet and Backup.
– The best one out there right now is WordPress Automatic Upgrade. It’s a little clunky, but it works, and saves SO MUCH TIME when you’re upgrading to the latest version. (It backs up too.)
– I also recommend the All In One SEO Pack, which does good things to your blog’s semantic design even if you don’t care about search engine optimization.
– The Autohyperlink plugin is useful (not sure if it’s still necessary on current WP versions) — it turns any URL into a link without having to enter code for it.
– Maintenance Mode lets you take your site offline with a message if you need to.
– WordPress Stats are fun, even if only in addition to other stats packages.
– And WP Super Cache may speed your site up, depending on your server config, your templates, and what kind of traffic you get.
I don’t have them active, but I have used MyDashboard and Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu in the past — the new WP 2.7 Dashboard is better than the old (in my opinion), so I don’t need them anymore. And if you do podcasting or plan to, podPress is still good (though you need to tweak some code for it to work, until it is updated one of these days), and the Blubrry Powerpress plugin is a good alternative that works out of the box and is updated regularly.
Thanks for all those suggestions, everyone! I can’t wait to get some time to play around with these!