Today I am going to share with you the plugins this very blog uses to stay alive. Keep in mind these are all wordpress plugins so the bloggers reading here not using wordpress yet may be out of luck on some of this fantastic and essential plugins.

A blogger needs help as content production and promotion are top concern for the new author and blog alike. This does not leave much time for the little things that make a blog home for so many of us when we come to visit. Keeping this in mind generally most people will have anywhere from 10-20 plugins. I am quite religous about the ones I keep active and installed as I like to have the smallest footprint on my server resources that is possible. This can be contributed to my overly clean nature or just plain craziness depending on how you want to think about it. This being said Less is More as too much is garbage not just for your resources but also your reader. Depending on your hosting package or your need for more than the essentials these are definate must haves as far as plug ins go.

If you do not see a critical plugin for your blog listed but would like to have it added to the bloggers toolbox please post it in the comments for this post.

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Every blogger that is serious and thinks about the end game needs a set of tools to succeed. The end game can be many different things for many different people, but for now lets not worry about what your goal is. Let’s get that blog up to par to help achieve your goals. This will mark an ongoing series of posts in the catagory of Blogging Tools. Keep your eyes out for these as they will all contain easy to use tools to improve your blog 100 fold.

The first little tool I will share with you is an excellent blog site load-time tester. This will give you an idea of what kind of overall shape your site is in. Generally a fast loading blog will be considered to be 5-7seconds. That is my opinion as I generally have a good assortment of plugins and javascripts to load. This being said if you load quicker than 5 seconds you probably have nothing to worry about in the load time department. My site is generally loading in 5-7 seconds depending on variables outside of my control.  But say a site like John Chow’s… loads generally around 15-20 seconds. This is something huge for a start up blogger to consider as most people will not wait 15-20 seconds on a new blog. Obviously JC is doing something right as he retains his traffic.

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July is poised to be the most exciting month so far for Big Ben Patton’s Place. This month I will be branching out from the usual blogging topics to include some basic marketing guides, product creation, affiliate marketing and email campaigns. I look forward to helping everyone get their feet wet, or even helping some veterans get a new edge.

I have in the works a few new contest ideas. My goal is to top 100 RSS Subscribers by the end of July. I also plan to average 5 comments per post in the hopes of raising commentation and participation. Alexa will be sub 80k. If a PR update happens the goal is 3+. Technorati sub 100k. Site-Rank 3+. To date I have not posted monetization results and at the moment I am still on the fence. While I do not mind helping people get started or even tackeling some advanced subjects I generally keep these figures underwraps as matter of personal preference.

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During my recent move from my private hosting to HostGator I changed a few things on the blog. The first thing was of course upgrading to the lastest version which I was not at the time. I also updated all of my plugins and made the correct back ups just in case something crazy happened.

Everything went pretty smooth. Supercache and sez who stopped working. A quick reinstall of super cache fixed whatever problem it was having so no sweat there. I struggled to figure out why sezwho would quit working though. For a few weeks while I was moving I attempted to get this working again as I had removed gravatar support from my theme and instead started to rely on sezwho for avatars and thread ranking as well as the history option for all posters and authors.

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A moment that I was for sure would never come had you asked me 6 months ago. It must be an exciting time to work for Microsoft these days. The Nightmare that is Vista will be the premier and only Top Tier being supported as such. Also this week we saw the man himself step down. Atleast in my opinion for now. He has decided to chair his charity and I commend him for it. The man is worth over 60 Billion. This will go very far in helping those that need it.

I had figured with all the petitions and buzz about the blogosphere and internet itself, much less not even considering the corporate ramification of it all that XP would enjoy at least one more incarnation to extend its domination of the PC os market. Today proves that fact wrong and XP is now an os of the past. No matter how much we scream and beg it is clear Microsoft is hedging its bets for Windows 7.

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