There’s no doubt that WordPress rocks as a blogging and content-management system. Once installed, you can do amazing things with it right out of the virtual box. In this post, I’m going to share with you the most essential plugins for your WordPress blog — 20 Must Have Killer Plugins for WordPress. I will explain why I find these plugins extremely useful as well as speak about some widgets that are worth using. These excellent WordPress plugins are intended to reduce and simplify tasks associated with blogging so that you can spend more time creating content, and less time with site administration.

For months, I’ve been able to bookmark hundreds of plugins, and now I’ve done all the work for you by sorting the best plugins you only need to truly leverage WordPress! In no particular order, here they are!

1. Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. This plug in can also check the trackbacks for spam. It’s no wonder why it’s already present in the default WordPress installation!

2. All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). As the name suggests, All in One SEO pack  provides an array of easy to understand options and helps your blog become SEO optimized. This is an absolute must have when it comes to SEO plugins. With over 2 million downloads and growing, I think it needs no more proof that it really works.

3. Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

4. ShareThis: The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.

5. StatPress Reloaded: This plugin (previously known as StatPress) shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

6. WP-DB-Backup: WP-DB-Backup allows you to easily backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database. It also allows you to optimize database, repair database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

7. LinkWithin: Unlike similar plugins that display a list of related posts, LinkWithin doesn’t just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.

8. WP-Polls: WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

9. Wordpress Thread Comment: This Plugin is an enhancement for Wordpress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

10. cformsII – contact form: cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi-form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

11. WP Hyper Cache: WP Hyper Cache is specifically written for people who have their blogs on low resources hosting provider (cpu and mysql).  This caching plugin can dramatically speed up your WordPress blog by generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more resource-hungry WordPress PHP scripts.

12. CommentLuv: Comments are a way of your readers showing love for you and your blog. CommentLuv helps you to return some love by including a titled link to your commentator’s last blog post or tweet at the end of their comment. This plugint crawls your commentator’s site/blog , gets the latest URL (up to 10 latest URLs if the commentator is a registered CommentLuv user) and parses it as HTML beneath the commentator’s name when they click submit. No wonder why this plugin has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it.

13. WP-Optimize: WP-Optimize is a wordpress 2.7++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue and un-approved comments within few clicks.

14. WP FollowMe: WP FollowMe is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your WordPress blog.

15. WP Greet Box: This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to Digg your post if they like it. The plug-in also includes out of the box support for getting messages from users coming from Reddit, SU, Facebook, Google , Mixx, etc. You can also easily add your own custom greeting for people coming from any site you choose. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with WPMU and various WordPress cache plugins (so you do not have to sacrifice speed).

16. Popularity Contest: Shows your readers your most popular posts based on views, comments, pingbacks, among other criteria. You can also change the weight of each criteria to determine the most popular post.

17. WP Since Last Visit: Indicates with a small “New” picture beside your post to users who have not yet seen your post from their last visit. Also works with comments.

18. Maintenance Mode: Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

19. Advertising Manager: This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your Wordpress blog. It automatically recognizes many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

20. Viper’s Video Quicktags: Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you.

How many of these pugins are you using already? Would you want to add one to this list? Feel free to share your thoughts.

Okay. This is the common and most difficult phase every blogger goes through. And, if you are also suffering from “Nobody is reading my Blog Syndrome”, then here are the six tips which you should follow to overcome from this phase.

1. Promote it! Time and again, we see that bloggers put all their efforts in developing content and do nothing to promote it. Twenty years ago, creating quality content was enough to get noticed but in current scenario if you are not promoting your content then you are just wasting your time. Because without promotion, nobody will be reading your blog (except you and your pets). Take the plunge and start promoting it among your family, friends, friend’s friends and wherever else possible. But make sure that you always promote the quality content else it can backfire and may harm your reputation as a blogger.

2. Numbers are not everything! Come on, don’t whine about stupid numbers. Numbers of comments and subscribers are not always an accurate gauge to measure success. Readers are usually busy (or lazy) people who don’t have time to comment. So don’t pay a lot of importance to numbers.

3. Take a break! Wait. Don’t get angry. I’m not asking you to quit. Try to get rid of your blogging addiction for a while, take a short break and get relaxed. Forget about your blog (if possible) and readers for the time being. Focus on other things which you wanted to do but couldn’t do because of blogging.

4. Invite guest authors! Invite guest authors to your blog. Guest authors mean fresh ideas, fresh approach, fresh content and fresh voice. Umm… Everything so fresh. And now you’ll be having more time to promote your content. Remember point one?

5. Generate more quality content! Yes. It might be possible that the content you are generating is not of the quality required for attracting reader’s attention. Go though other popular blogs of your niche to understand the taste of your readers. Try to find out their likes and dislikes and create content according to it.

6. Have patience – Grr! Learn to have patience my friend. You’re not alone who want to be successful in blogging. There are millions and millions of blogs on the web with the same type (if not identical) of content. Don’t dream about overnight results, unless you are blogging from another planet. Have patience and keep doing the quality work. You will definitely get the attention you deserve sooner or later.

Okay. There were the six important tips from me. Now it’s your turn. Please share your tips you want to give to fellow bloggers in the comments below.

As a reader of blogs I also like it when the authors let their readers in on the blog statistics. For TechChunks, there have been many highlights in these 5 months. When we got our first commentators/subscribers, when our first post got featured at PCWorld and MacWorld, when we were featured as the “Site of the Day” at SiteProNews, when TechChunks was interviewed at SpeakBindas, when we hosted our first ever Contest where we gave away prizes worth over $1000, when Google awarded us PR2, when we launched guest blogging here at TechChunks… too much to list. Also just the feeling of starting something from scratch is a great feeling in itself.

Blog Statistics:

- Google PR from 0 to 2
- Alexa traffic Rank – 72,100
- 153 published blog articles
- 1257 approved comments
- Over 10,200 Twitter followers
- More than 20,000 visitors per month at the moment
- More than 50,000 page views per month at the moment
- Most visitors in a day 4968 (happened on Jan 29)

Lessons Learned:

However, it’s quite disheartening to see posts I literally spent all night writing having only a few hundred pageviews, while other posts that took me literally minutes to sum up are the most popular ones. But it is something that tells me quite a lot:

- People don’t like series. They like everything in one go.
- Top 10, Top 5 lists and How to style tutorial posts are popular. Very popular. Next comes latest technology updates.
- The majority of readers just want the info; and none of discussion stuff that I like to shoehorn in.
- Writing about Twitter, iPhone, Google, Wordpress or even Windows is a surefire way to generate some buzz among your readers.

20 Most Popular Articles on TechChunks in these 5 Months:

Finally, thanks for reading/subscribing/commenting on TechChunks and we hope that we can continue providing interesting content for you to come back again and again. Happy Blogging

However, as a reminder of how things went here at TechChunks, here is a hand-picked list of selected round-up posts that we wrote in Jan 2010. Take a look at them and use this as an opportunity to go thorough the articles that you might have missed earlier.

We are always looking for experienced writers who can write good original quality posts on TechChunks.com. Please contact us if you would like us to consider you. Make sure you give us details of your own blog or a link to some articles you have written.

Benefits for Writer

In return you will get full credit for the post, an author section with a bio and your website will also be linked at the bottom of every post you make. You can see an example of the bio section at the bottom of every post on TechChunks.com. Please note that we do not allow contributors to have control over their own accounts (due to Wordpress security risks). You will have an author account, you will have freedom to set your author bio details (maximum 1 link) and you will have your author bio displayed below EVERY post that you write for us. But WE will publish your posts via your author accounts and will NOT share the login credentials with you.

[Please note that we have very strict guidelines regarding quality, grammar and spelling and hence every post that you write are subjected to editorial proofreading. However, if we find  a post to be very inferior in quality we will simply reject it and will NOT publish it.]

Rules, Guidelines and Incentives

- Each article should be informative and relate to Technology, SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Gadgets or Tips & Tricks in some way. The reader should come away knowing something they did not know before they read it.

- Each article should be interesting to read. This does not mean that every piece of writing needs to be filled with wisecracks, but it shouldn’t be dry as toast.

- Each article needs to be original! This means you can’t drop by TechCrunch and copy their list of 40 coolest gadgets in 2010! This also means that you can’t reproduce your own blog posts here.

- Lists of cool sites that have something in common are ok (with screen shots), reviews of popular sites or cool new services are ok (as long as they aren’t yours!), tutorials are EXTREMELY welcome, and tips, tricks, simple how-tos, news like stories (technology-related) and information on helpful resources are all acceptable.

- Any images used in the post cannot mess up the design of the site. As a guideline, the image should be 500 pixels in width and 300 pixels in height.

- Every post made in this blog is linked to directly from the home page of TechChunks (remember, the homepage sends through a PR 2 value to the pages it links to), it is also tweeted on our twitter account (we’ve got around 34,000 or so twitter followers right now (our 2 accounts combined) and all of our posts are submitted directly to Friendfeed)

- If you write 5 or more blog posts for us per month, you will get a permanent sidebar listing on our blog’s main right side navigation (there will be a new section for Top Contributors on the side bar).

- If you write 10 or more blog posts per month, we can discuss additional publicity and monetary benefits ($$$) for your website/blog and you.

- You may still link to each of your posts from your own website or blog so that your own readers can still follow all of your work.

- No affiliate codes or referral links are allowed in posts.

How do I get started?

If this deal sounds good to you, then contact us with the following info:

- Your Name, will appear as the author name.
- Your e-mail.
- Your blog url.
- One or two examples of something you have written about before.
- If you would like to become a regular author or a part-time author.
- The kind of topics you’d like to write about on TechChunks.com.
- 2-4 Sentences About You (To be used for your author Bio section).
- Your Avatar/photograph if possible (To be used for your author Bio section).

Once we verify and approve your candidacy we can begin working together from there.

There are some Stunning, amazing, cool Premium themes out there which are nicely designed, innovative, SE optimized, flexible and yet being FREE! I am not the first one to write about these FREEMIUM Wordpress themes and I won’t be the last as well. But I am restricting myself to those Free & Premium Wordpress themes which can be used for Blogs with Magazine or News based content. Today I present only 10 Free Premium-like WordPress Themes that are truly impressive and you might be willing to use for your next project.

Stunning Free but Premium Wordpress News / Magazine Styled Themes:

1. Androida

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2. FREEmium wordpress theme

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3. Mimbo 3.0

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4. Magasin Dos

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5. Magasin Uno

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6. Arthemia Free Magazine Theme

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7. Branford Magazine

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8. Skyye News

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9. Grungezine

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10. Zinmag Tribune

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Which of the above themes did you like the most? Are you already using any of these (if yes, tell us your blog URL). If you liked this post, then make sure you also read – 1000+ Free Wordpress Premium Themes – Greatest Ever Collection!

1. “1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d”  – spotted on a tee shirt

2. Microsoft: “You’ve got questions. We’ve got dancing paperclips.”  – Unknown

3. “My pokemon brings all the nerds to the yard, and they’re like you wanna trade cards? Darn right, I wanna trade cards, I’ll trade this but not my charizard.”  – Unknown

4. “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”  – Unknown

5. “If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0.”  – spotted on a tee shirt

6. “I’m not anti-social; I’m just not user friendly.”  – spotted on a tee shirt

7. “When Life Gives You Questions, Google has Answers.”  – AJ Carpio

8. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”  – Unknown

9. “The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it’s twice as big as it needs to be.”  – Unknown

10. “I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.”   – Unknown

And here is the ultimate one:

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.” - Unknown

What is your most favorite Geekiest Quote, by the way?

At the FTC’s Journalism and Internet Workshop in December, Murdoch said, “There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite, at times without attribution, the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks or even months in their stories—all under the tattered veil of ‘fair use.’”

It is no surprise that a News Corp. publication would block a site like NewsNow, and this could just be the beginning of a long string of similar moves from News Corp. and other like-minded publishers. The real question is – will they follow through with the blocking of major search engines (namely Google)? That would be a much bolder move.

NewsNow founder Struan Bartlett is not exactly backing down from the fight. He has gone so far as to launch a campaign called Right2Link, the premise of which is essentially – linking to online content is a basic right, or officially:

Whether you are a consumer, an NGO, a blogger, an independent researcher, a concerned citizen or a business, your right to link needs protection.

Bartlett offers the following video to make his case:

Bartlett picks out the following as “the threats” of media owners stopping people from linking to content:

- Serious damage to the ease of access to digital information that drives the economy.
- Media owners cherry-picking organisations to target, accusing them of copyright theft, or demanding cash — this is already happening!
- Media organizations with significant economic power cutting deals with selected corporate search engines to guide the public to their online media, their opinions and their political and commercial allies.
- Media with the power to enforce it levying additional so-called “license fees” from any business or organization using or linking to their websites.

It should be noted that NewsNow offers a paid service, and this is probably the biggest reason News Corp. targeted it out of all other possibilities (of which there must be an astonishing number). But does that matter? If the linking site isn’t stealing actual content, and is simply linking, does it matter if they charge for their service? Nobody is saying media owners don’t have the right to put up paywalls around their content, but if that content is freely available, why shouldn’t anyone be able to freely point to it with a link? What do you think? Would you ever want to BLOCK someone from LINKING to your content?

While this over-dependency on the Internet is alarming, it exposes another side of the story. Have you ever wondered about the size of the internet? As surprising as it might sound, some of us simply never realize how huge the internet really is. Let’s take a look at a few statistics for an average day on the internet and see how big these numbers really are..

via Online Education

What do these numbers mean to you? Did you ever imagine the size of the Internet to be so huge? How much addicted are you to the internet? Can you live without it?

While IMDb.com, fully named the Internet Movie Database, is owned by online bookselling giant Amazon.com, and claims over 57 million monthly visitors, Wired.com is the online affiliate of Wired magazine and ranks among top 1000 sites in Alexa. The block adds IMDB.com and Wired.com to a long list of sites that are or have been considered too dangerous for Chinese net users.

Current blacklist members and alumni include popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia and even Google. China’s censorship of the net is in constant flux, aided by sets of powerful firewalls marketed to the Communist government by Western technology companies. While it is Ridiculous and hopefully China will someday learn from these mistakes, lets just hope they don’t try to censor the entire world first.

However, I think Thats ok. Let them prevent a billion people from accessing Wikipedia. It hurts me not in the slightest. Let them prevent a billion people from accessing everything. Can you imagine how much more difficult it will be to grow an educated population without the basic internet sites? Silly people. And its a waste of time anyway. These filters keep honest people honest. Anybody in China can use a proxy server to access these sites anyway. Many websites and personal blogs were banned since 2008. Some of these sites are excellent technical places or resource exchange platforms. What a pity.

At the end of the day, I feel that it is GOOD for you IMDB and Wired! Anybody who earns a black-out from the Chinese censors goes up a notch in my estimation (as long as they don’t pull their punches in the future as a result). I would be least surprised if tomorrow China decides to block TechChunks.com as a result of this particular article. But who cares? Would you care, if tomorrow you find your blog being black-listed in China?