GreatWebGuySelf-proclaimed greatness is a hard thing to prove.

You may have noticed that I’m short on entries this past week. New to blogging and easily distracted by shiny things, wordpress plug-ins are my Kryptonite. If you’re not hosting your own blog and not playing with plug-ins all the time I imagine you’re probably a much more productive blogger than me. I got off to a good rolling start, a few thousand visits last week, which I can see in a nice pretty chart thanks to Google Analytics and the wordpress plug-in that goes along with it. Every time I see a cool plug-in on someone elses blog, I feel inclined to try it out myself.

My current plug-in list looks like this:

• Ad Rotator - Let’s you stick your banner ads line by line in a text file and rotates through all the ads in the file, you’re able to specify the ads by name.
• AJAX Comments - Adds some of that AJAX shininess when users post comments, a little animations that let’s you see the comment post without a page refresh. I know it’s absolutely useless, but cool.
• Akismet - This one blocks spam in the comments.
• AuthImage - This one puts a captcha image in the comment section to avoid automated comment spamming. I like it but can be a bit annoying, I really have a hard time reading the letters from the images, which at times can cause me to lose my comments when I submit.
• diggIT - Let’s you display the number of diggs on your site and have a nice big visible Digg button, I kind of stopped using this one because it seems like it can hurt page load times.
• Executable PHP widget - Nice sidebar widget that let’s you place code into it, you can place pretty much anything in the widget, I think mybloglog is in mine.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement - Supposedly this one replaces all of your feeds with your feedburner url, I never quite got it working, time was wasted, I was frustrated, finally I edited the them and replaced the feed urls myself.
• Google Adsense widget - Let’s you stick Adsense code into your widgetized sidebar, you could also do this with the PHP widget, may be redundant.
• Google Analytics - Adds the snippet of code that Google requires for your analytics account, I had the code in there before so I probably spent more time downloading this plug-in and installing it than it really saved me.
• Google Sitemaps - Generates a sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz every time you post an entry, the sitemap’s are supposed to be compatible with Google, Yahoo, and MSN’s search.
• Jerome’s Keywords - Let’s you assign tags to your posts so that you can have one of those fancy Web 2.0 tag clouds.
• keywords-tagcloud widget - Integrates with Jerome’s Keywords to display a tagcloud in your sidebar, it’s Web 2.0, it’s cool.
• Kramer - This supposedly takes all your technorati links and turns them into ping backs, I have it installed activated and have yet to actually use it, me wasting time again.
• MyBlogLog Widget - This displays a picture of all the other MyBlogLog people that have been to your site, it’s a cool community and the people seem to be nice so far.
• Share This - One of those social bookmark widgets, this one is very Ajaxy but lacks in other places, for instance whenever you select a place to bookmark the site to it takes you from the page, which then makes it hard to fill out the information to bookmark the article.
• Sidebar Widgets - This is a required plug-in if you have a widgetized theme, it provides that nice drag and drop interface to drag your widgets to your sidebars.
• Snap Preview AnywhereTM Plugin - This plug-in pops a preview of the site you’re linking to, I used this for about a week when I realized it slowed page load time when trying to retrieve a snapshot of the page and it was just plain annoying everytime I hovered over a link for a second this preview popped up.
• Webvirtue Share Your Post-2 - Another Share This type of plug-in, but pops in a new window and allows you to bookmark the article without leaving the article.
• WP-PostRatings - Another AJAX plug-in that allows your users to rate your postings, this is one of my latest additions, I’m the only one that’s rated anything and that was just to test the plug-in
• WP-UserOnline - Tells your who’s logged into your site, which seems kind of pointless since this is a one man blog, I like that I can see the number of users viewing the blog.
• WP-UserOnline Widget - Widgetizes the plug-in above, so I can drag and drop instead of editing the theme.

So, as you can see, I’ve been busy, not writing my blog. Hopefully I can get back to writing, as soon as I check out this last plug-in….