One of the advantages of setting up WordPress on my own server is the ability to add plugins that make my blogging life easier. Each plugin takes a little bit of extra memory, but I think they’re worth it. Here are 31 of the plugins I use on my blog at http://sachachua.com . (If you’re curious about where I host, I use Linode at $30/month, although there are cheaper hosting options)

Organization

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Awesome way to see what I’ve got scheduled for when, and drag-and-drop interface for rescheduling posts

Redirection

Super-useful for setting up short URLs or dealing with broken links

Share a Draft

Excellent way to give people sneak previews

Show Menu Shortcode

More shortcuts for adding in-page navigation

Short Post URLs

Quick numeric URLs for easy sharing

Commenting

Akismet

spam filtering for comments

Better WordPress Recent Comments

paginated list of comments in my sidebar. I like quickly seeing new comments, so this is handy.

Security

Better WP SecurityBecause a compromised blog sucks.Wordfence SecuritySecurity, of course

Discovery

On This Day

Because I’ve got more than ten years of posts and it’s interesting to look back into the past

WordPress Popular Posts

Because data

Post-Plugin Library

Needed by the Similar Posts plugin

Similar Posts

Suggestions

Categories and tags

Term Management Tools

Rein in your categories and tags

Categorized

Gets rid of “Uncategorized” when I actually pick a category. Handy when I was reorganizing.

Display Posts Shortcode

Lets me easily list posts from a category or tag

WP Views

Flexible system for creating lists of things (paid plugin)

Images

Easy Add Thumbnail

Because I’d rather not set the featured image myself if I already have an image

NextGEN Gallery by Photocrati

Easy to add images to. Great for my sketchnotes.

Stats

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Because stats are helpful

Google Analytics for WordPress

Because stats are helpful

Other conveniences

Highlight Search Terms

Making life easier for searchers

Jetpack by WordPress.com

A behemoth of a plugin, but the subscriptions are easier for people

RSS Footer

Add links to my scraped content

WP-Polls

This makes it easy to ask quick questions, which I should do more of

Subscribers Text Counter

Social proof without dealing with visually-conflicting widgets

WP Missed Schedule

Helps guard against missed schedule posts. Still happens, though

A patched version of Auto Featured Image

I changed this to pick the largest image

Sacha Chua’s fixes

Little tweaks to make my blogging life easier, such as adding Share a Draft and Redirection to my post editing screen

Every so often, I go through my list and remove plugins I don’t use as much in order to reduce memory use and improve security. Still, with thousands of plugins available on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins, there are always more ways to make blogs better. (Come to think of it, I should probably add a SEO-focused plugin too. WordPress SEO by Yoast seems popular…) Hope this list of favourites helps!