WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
It may look fairly simple, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk! Not that I can take most of the credit - it’s done by tweaking and implementing excellent plugins created by others. So here’s the plugins I’m currently using to make this blog work the way it does, along with an explanation of what each does:
The theme I use for this site is a customized version of 3 Column K2 for Wordpress, which is itself a customized version of the excellent K2 theme. In reality, it’s more than a theme as it comes with plugins pre-installed and the theme configured for a lot more. 
- Admin Drop-Down Menu - saves lots of clicks in the admin area by having the various sub-options appear when you hover over a main option.
- Admin Menu - puts a link to login at the top of your blog meaning that you don’t have to have admin links within your sidebar. Once you’ve logged in this changes to links within the admin menu.
- Audio Player - this allows you to insert a flash-based MP3 player in a post or page.
- Brian’s Latest Comments - displays the latest commenters to make comments on your blog, along with the posts upon which they have commented.
- Code Auto Escape - useful if you want to show but not execute code on your blog (for example HTML code).
- Custom Query String - allows you to specify how many posts you want to display at a time in different views. This is how I am able to show just one post + preview on the front page, but more at a time elsewhere…
- Download Manager - I haven’t made extensive use of this (yet!) but it allows you to track and restrict (if needed) downloads from your website. I’m always interested in how many people visit my blog and download my stuff!
- Dunstan’s Time Since - displays the ‘time since’ you posted something rather than the date it was posted.
- EditorMonkey - a WYSIWYG editor for blog posts and comment boxes. I still prefer posting using HTML or the inbuilt Visual Editor with Wordpress, but it’s useful for adding WYSIWYG options to the comments box. (no longer in development)
- Email Shroud - protects email addresses displayed on your blog from getting spammed.
- Extended Live Archives - produces an easy-to-navigate and visually appealing archives page. You can dig into past posts by chronology, folksonomy or taxonomy. Works with Ultimate Tag Warrior (see below).
- Filosofo Old-Style Upload - allows you to upload files to an area on your blog via a web-based interface (the one under the editor window is limited to images)
- Google Sitemaps - automatically creates an .xml sitemap and submits it to Google after every post, meaning greater searchability!
- Gravatar - stands for ‘Globally recognized avatar’ and allows commenters to have a little avatar displayed next to their comment (if they’ve signed up for free at the Gravatar website)
- Less - makes it so that when you click on a link to see the full post it starts at the top rather than after the first paragraph.
- Multi-Topic Icon - responsible for the icon at the top-left of each post on this blog, dependent upon which main category it is posted in.
- Podpress - a great plugin that makes podcasting with Wordpress very simple.
- Post Count - unsurprisingly, counts the total number of posts made on your blog.
- Random Posts - displays a specified number of random posts, just to mix it up a bit…
- Related Posts - gives a list of other posts on your blog which are likely to be related to the one currently being viewed.
- SimpleTwitter - displys the most recent Twitter status update from a specified account.
- Sociable - automatically adds links to popular social bookmarking sites to the bottom of each post.
- Spam Karma 2 - stops your blog from getting spam posts. Works extremely well - especially on the ‘Kinda Mean’ setting!
- Translator - provides automatic machine translation to several different languages. Also displays pretty flags which users can click on to see posts in their language.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior - an absolute must. Allows you to ‘tag’ your posts with keywords which can then be manipulated to great effect. The tag cloud on the sidebar is created with this.
- Viper’s Video Quicktags - easy inserting of video from various sources, including Google Video, Youtube, iFilm, etc. - as well as user-uploaded files.
- What Would Seth Godin Do - a strangely-named plugin that adds a welcome message to new visitors, inviting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.
- Wordpress Database Backup - creates a backup of your database (the thing which contains your posts and pages, amongst other things) which can then be either downloaded or sent to your email account.
- Wordpress Mobile Edition - automatically provides a stripped-down version of your blog for viewing on mobile devices.
- Wordpress Reports - provides interesting reports on use of your blog from Feedburner and Google Analytics (if you use these services)
- WP-Cache - stores (caches) your blog’s pages in a static file to make requests quicker. This speeds up your site and reduces server load.
- WP-Contact - makes adding a contact form to your blog straightforward and painless (as seen on the Contact page)
- Wp-UserOnline - tells you (and the rest of the world) how many people are currently visiting your blog.
- X-Dashboard - allows you to customize your dashboard in the admin area to display more useful information.
- Yahoo/MSN Smileys - allows you to add either MSN-style (as on this blog) or Yahoo!-style smileys to your blog!
Other plugins I recommend but don’t currently use for this blog:
- Random Header - changes the header of your blog (where the title, etc. is shown) at random according to those that you provide.
- Random Quotes - allows you to display a random quote from a user-created databased. Configurable via CSS.
- Search Meter - keeps track of what your visitors are searching for, but only if you’re using the built-in search function!
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