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Dear Cool Tool Makers and Blogging Gurus,

We’d like to thank you from the bottom of our shriveled little hearts, for all the time you’ve spent in the basement developing the cool blogging tools that we’ve implemented on our site. They rock.

Kudos to you for helping to pave the way with your skills, smarts and your generosity. You’re the best.

And just so you know exactly who we are talking about, our “Bitter Nod of Approval” goes to:

Wordpress by Automatic. We started our research a while ago, and since then you’ve grown to be the de facto open source blogging tool of choice. And we thank you and the ever-growing pool of plugin developers for doing such a cool job.

Akismet - it came with our Wordpress install, and it took us a while to figure out what that API key thing is (hey - we’re content specialists, not programmers), but we haven’t had spam trouble yet. Lurvely.

Adsense beautifier - by Supriyadi Slamet Widodo, makes our ads so purdy. Update: We had to take you down because the Adsense people said you were too pretty.

Sitemap plugin by dagondesign.com - By Aleister. Because displaying your posts by chronologically may not be the best way to do it.

Meta Tag Description Plugin - By Kaf Oseo. SEO is big, and this helps us get lots of search hits. We think.

My page order plugin - By froman118, keeps us oh, so orderly.

FeedBurner Plugin v2.2 - By Steve Smith. Changes your automatic feed to be your Feedburner feed. It does make sense to send only one feed out there, doesn’t it?

Page Link Manager Plugin - By Garrett Murphey. We don’t program PHP, so this plugin allows us to choose which of our pages need to be in the main navigation, and which ones can be in the footer only.

simple tags - By Broobles. Makes it really easy to add Technorati Tags to the end of your posts.

WP-ContactForm - By Ryan Duff. To keep the spammers away.

WordPress Database Backup - because it’s the first thing we learned at school: back it up. And then again.

Updates:
Similar Posts - By Rob Marsh, SJ. Adds a list of related posts to the bottom of your article. Based on Related Posts, but allows you to exclude static pages and categories. Beautiful. (Jan. 21, 2007)

Google Sitemap Creator, by Arne Brachhold, because whatever Google wants, it should get. (April 8, 2007)

Optimal Title, By Aaron Schaefer makes your page title an SEO magnet, and moves your page title to the front before your blog name. This means more meaningful search engine results because some search engines have a character limit and weigh the first words more heavily. It’s good for browser bookmark names too.(April 8, 2007)

Duplicate Content Cure. Seems duplicate content is bad and can harm your Google page rankings. You sure don’t want that, so make sure it won’t happen with this plugin. (April 8, 2007)

More Bitter Nods to our favourite Wordpress and Blogging advisers and experts :

We’ve got lots in our Google Reader, but these are the blogs we turn to first, and all the time. They just give and keep on giving.

Lorelle on Wordpress
Has it all down. We trust her.

Fave post :

• The Art of a Good Site Map convinced us to get a site map going.

Problogger.net.
Darren Rouse helps bloggers earn money. He writes candidly and freely and we just love that.

Fave post: (though they are all good):

• How To Market Your Blog in 2007 - thorough!

John chow dot com.
Half guilty pleasure, because he is so shamelessly self-promoting, half because he’s out there and likes to share what he learns.
Fave post:

• Making Money From A Blog - December Recap

Reclusive Leftist
Doctor Violet Socks is funny and super smart. And that’s our favourite way to be.

Fave post:

• Religions Evolve, Part 1: Christianity

So, thanks once again. And if there’s something you think we’ve missed that could help us out and make our blogging lives easier and more effective, please let us know.

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