A nice pic of a boat on a lake. Not really relevant with the post

A nice pic of a boat on a lake. Not really relevant with the post, but still pleasing

Intro

With the recent move from wordpress.com to a self hosted wordpress.org blog, I had the possibilities to pick some plugins that really have helped me to set-up and make the blog a tad bit more customized and close to my needs.

I’m gonna list them here, with a small description so it may be handy for someone else that is researching the subject as well

The handpicked Plugins

  • Worpress Importer This plugins lets you import your old wordpress.com blog in the new wordpress installation. Make sure you have `import everything` selected when you do the import, so all the images and attachments are happily downloaded and imported as well.You have to make sure you have increased the max upload file on you server, if you are importing a very big file. This is done changing you php configuration and the limit of max upload either in nginx or apache, depending what you are using. More info how to do this here.
  • Next plugin you want to get is JetPack from wordpress. This plugin has a lot of feautures that you can activate as you see fit. My favourite onese are: publicize (automatic sharing on G+, Facebook and Twitter), Moitor, that keeps an eye if your site goes offline and Photon, to serve images quicker from their CDN.
  • Spam is always a bad thing, and BruteProtect is a way to pretect yourself from it. You just activate it, and it is going to do is job.
  • Once you move to self-hosted blog, you have to manage also the backup for your site.
    A very handy plugin is UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore, which gives you the ability to:

    1. Make automatic backup of your blog, including database, images, themes and plugins
    2. Upload you backup to a third party service, like for example DropBox
    3. Configure a schedule for your backup, with also a number of old backups you want to keep. My pick was 10 backups, with a weekly schedule.
    4. Restore your old backups with a single click.

    It’s very well designed and it works like a charm. Totally recommended

  • To make sure you write to the point, and keep your post interesting also for search engines, Worpress SEO is a good candidate. Although the title parser looks only for one keyword, so there will be always a disagreement between the plugin and a sane title, it’s extremely handy to keep sitemap up to date and automatically signal google when a new post pop up. Handy tool.
  • Due to the amount of code I tend to post, a nice way to present it, with proper highlighting it’s useful to have. For this I’ve picked Enlighter – Customizable Syntax Highlighter, which does a very good work, comes with themes to nicely integrate with the current palette of your site.
  • Last but not least, the Disqus Comment System is a nice and, according to me, superior way to enable comments on your post. It offers an import function to transfer all your old wordpress.com comments on the disqus system, and it’s pretty nice thing to have.

So there it is, some of the plugins I’m using on this website, which you may, or may not, find useful for your own site.