Once you have decided on which theme you are going to use for your blog, you can start customizing it and making it your own by installing plugins. Here are a few I recommend you check out.
Akismet
This is the first and primary plugin you should install once WordPress is setup. Akismet is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
So far it has saved me from checking and deleting over 2,000 spam comments, and the count is growing by the hour. Install Akismet to zero out comment spam.
Get it here.
Feedburner Plugin
If you have replaced your blogs RSS feed with a personalized FeedBurner feed (which I recommend you do), you will not want to sort through all the back-end code to manually change the link over.
The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.
Get it here.
Subscribe to Comments
Provide your readers with a way to keep up to date with the latest comments on a post with this plugin. It will display a small check-box next to the comment field when a user is posting a comment, allowing them to receive new comment updates directly to their inboxes.
Get it here.
Top Commenters
Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
Get it here.
SRG Clean Archives
I am using this plugin to run my Archives page. SRG Clean Archives is a rather simple WordPress plugin that will allow you to display your archives in a much “cleaner” format than any other plugin available.
Get it here.
Next up and last in the series before we move onto Blogging 202, is picking a stat tracker to track the stats of your blog.
What plugins have you installed on your blog?