Here are some of my favourite ones (in no particular order) and those with keen eyes would notice a few of these already.

•  AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, etc.
• Akismet – this is for comment spam control and is used by millions! Excellent!
• WP FollowMe – allows you to add a twitter Follow me badge on your wordpress blog.
• Google Analyticator – name says it all I think.
• Google XML Sitemaps – same as above.
• Lightbox 2 – Used to overlay images on the current page.
• My Page Order – allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface.
• Really Simple CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins; really works too!
• Search Everything – Adds search functionality and includes search highlight, search pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments, tags and custom fields (metadata). It can also exclude specific pages and posts. It does not search password-protected content.
• Shockingly Big IE6 Warning – doesn’t the name say it all?
• Simple Tags – Excellent plugins, to manage your tags. Includes, suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc
• StatPress Reloaded – real time stats for the blog
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – code to your site without having to modify the code at all; you cannot use the Visual editor with this.
• TinyMCE Advanced – Enables advanced features and plugins for the visual editor
• Twitter for WordPress – displays your last few tweets
• WP-Cumulus – Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress
• WP-DBManager – Excellent plugin, that manages your WordPress including optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, etc. I use to exclusively for the automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of the database.
• WP-SmugMug – I use SmugMug for my photos online; this plugin integrates the SmugMug galleries into the blog.

I would highly recommend the above and suggest you play with them. 

These plugins I have only recently installed and they seem interesting, but I have not used them enough to have the confidence to highly recommend them – yet.

• WordPress Backup (by BTE) – Backup the upload directory (images), current theme directory, and plugins directory to a zip file. I have only recently installed this plugin, and not used it enough to say how useful it is at this point.
• Automatic WordPress Backup – Automatically upload backups of important parts of your blog to Amazon S3. I am a huge S3 fan, and this seems very promising. Hopefully I can come back in a few days and weeks and blog about it.

Finally, when using plugins I would recommend the following:

• Search and install from these via the “Plugins” menu which you see when log into your WordPress dashboard. Don’t download the code manually and then try and upload it to your site. That is a more painful process.
• Try and have a test blog running – seperately from your main blog where you can test different permutations and configurations. In case something goes wrong, you won’t have your main blog go down. Of course needless to say, you should keep both your test and main blog on the same version.
• It is not a good idea to install all of the plugin’s all at the same time as you never never which plugin can cause conflict with another. Well, you can install all the plugins at the same time, just activate them one at a time and test that your blog is still running as expected after you have activated each plugin.
• Before you upgrade the version of WordPress – irrespective of how big or small the upgrade is always backup your database and files first. This would allow you to revert back to a “clean slate” in case something goes wrong.

Suggestions for any apps? My phone is HTC wildfire and nothing fancy so the apps should be able to run on this phone.

Update: The official TED video below is quite cool and in addition to the one above, also adds more interesting features such as video – check it out.

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Overall it was simple to setup via the .htaccess file and some simple regex. The only thing I found the hard way was that I should be using “RedirectMatch” when setting up the regex rule rather than the “Redirect” which is what I was using. You would use Redirect when trying to redirect without any variables.

So, as in my case I wanted to redirect from the old url (of community server) to the new one (of wordpress)

• Old: http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu.aspx
• New: http://desigeek.com/blog/amit/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu/

So I need to make the following changes:

• Change the “/weblog” to “/blog”
• Get rid of “/archive”
• Get red of the “.aspx” extension

The following rule helped me achieve this:

RedirectMatch 301 /weblog/amit/archive/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/(.*)\.aspx$ http://desigeek.com/blog/amit/$1/$2/$3/$4

Of course there are a few more rules I have which I cannot go into details.

Along the way i also discovered a few interesting tools which can help you view the results – one is LiveHTTPHeaders; another good one is http://web-sniffer.net/.

If you are new to this, then a few very good tools online. I would suggest start with this post from Zo and this tutorial on regex.

i still have one outstanding issue where if I want to redirect part of the URL and not the complete thing, I am not sure how to do it. For example if I want to redirect the old url above to just the year/month of the post instead if the actual post, not sure how to go about doing it. So I want the url below to map to the the one below that.

• URL to Map: http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu.aspx
• Should map to: http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/

Am surprised by the negativity on the blog. I am no Linux expert and am more comfortable in Windows, but having used more of Ubuntu (9.04 and 9.10) over the last few weeks for my studies has made be appreciate some aspects even more. Is it perfect? Of course not, and nor is Windows or OS X or insert-your-favourite-OS-here. Maybe I should try and start a blog hater blog.

Also I tried using the %tag% field, but it does not like it and had to revert to using %categories% as you probably can see. Again, any suggestions there?

Update: Also should be able to use Windows Live Writer when posting the code. Am I asking for too much here?

• Make sure you use a “flash” drive (or USB stick) and not a USB HDD drive as some of those have issues with this.
• Check different USB ports – all of them may not allow to boot up.

To disable Auto-Tuning:

1. Click the Start button , and then, in the Search box, type cmd.
2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to run the program as an administrator. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
3. At the command prompt, type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable, and then press Enter.
4. When the process has finished, restart your computer. If this procedure does not solve the problem, you can turn Auto-Tuning back on by repeating steps a and b of this procedure, typing netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal, and then pressing Enter.