After the redesign I have implanted many new tricks and plugins into my WordPress theme to improve performance, the look and productivity options of my blog.

Other blogs have been writing articles like these too, but I will add a couple that aren’t the usual plugins that you have already implanted.

1. Advanced Excerpt – Because I needed to customize the default excerpt function of WordPress I decided to give this plugin a go. I can now do everything I want with my excerpts like the number of words, the html characters that are allowed, the ending character and more.

2. DoFollow – There has been numerous discussion going on about the Dofollow. Is it a good step to take with your blog? I think it is, it haven’t increased my spam posts, but it have increased the ‘look-like-real-comments-but-are-spam’ comments. You will get more discussion, and a little more moderation.

3. FD Feedburner Plugin – If you are using Feedburner as your RSS service, you should have this plugin installed. This make sure all the subscribers subscribed to www.yourblog.com/feed/ are redirected to feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog.

4. Feed Pauser – Feed Pauser was exactly what I was looking for. After almost every post I found some small typos in my article but the article was yet send to the RSS feed, I couldn’t change the typos there. With Feed Pauser you can choose to let WordPress send your post to the RSS feed after a number of minutes so you make sure everything is fine.

5. FV Code Highlighter – If you want to highlight code tags like HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript on your WordPress blog you could use the other plugins out there. This plugin however is developed to give the blogger full control over their codes. You can style everything in this code highlighter!

6. RSS Footer – My fellow Dutchman Joost de Valk know what bloggers need. This RSS footer plugin let you do exactly what its name tell us: add a line of text, a copyright notice or even advertisements after or before each post that is published in your RSS feed.

7. Samsarin PHP Widget – If you want to use widgets for your sidebar, there might be time you need to use PHP to get the functionality you like to have. This “PHP widget” is a an awesome solution as you can choose as many widgets as you like.

8. Search Excerpt – The default search function sucks, we used to sort by date and not by relevance. Fortunately there has been some talking about this and this plugin has been developed to help us.

9. WP Existing Tags – This small plugin adds an existing tags-section to your new post page. This makes it easy to choose a tag for your post and makes sure you don’t make two tags almost identical to each other.

10. WordPress Download Monitor – If you offer downloads for your visitors it might be nice to know how many times files are downloaded. This awesome plugin does a good job.