Plugins
I don’t generally like to use a lot of plugins, because I like to keep things straight forward and simple (for myself and you). However, there are a few which I’ve found necessary - no, VITAL - to running this blog. 
All descriptions from respective websites.
- Admin Theme Preview allows for the preview of any currently installed theme without affecting the “live” blog theme viewable to site visitors. Useful for development and testing of new and existing WordPress themes.
- 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.
- Gravatar makes available a tag called gravatar that, when used inside the Comment Loop, outputs the correct gravatar URL based on the commenters email address.
- Livejournal Crossposter automatically copies new posts to a specified LiveJournal (or DeadJournal or any other LJ-based hosts). Editing and deleting crossposted entries causes the same changes to be made on the LiveJournal. (I use this to cross posts made into the categories “BS,” “Bookmobile,” and “Booking Through Thursday,” to my book LJ, Poetadoctus.)
- My Page Order is heaven in a plugin, allowing you to display your WP pages in the order you want to, rather than the order WordPress defaults.
- Now Reading allows you to create and maintain a virtual library of books. You can manage a reading list, display your entire library, describe your books with metadata, tags and reviews, and more.
- Show Top Commentators displays your top commenters’ names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
