Google have already dipped their toes into RSS feeds with Google Reader. While Google Reader is designed for those wishing to read RSS feeds, it doesn’t provide any functionality for publishers. With this acquisition, Google now has the ability to provide full RSS management and RSS reading. Along with the feed management side, Google also gets access to something much more important to them – Feedburners client creator list and the content itself. For a search company interested in indexing the entire world wide web, $100 million for this type of information must have seemed like a bargain.

I also modified one of the sidebar widgets that came with the theme I’m using and I created a “Plugroll” widget. All I did was add a link for each installed plug-in to my blogroll, gave them a category called plugroll, and used the widget to list them automatically. You can see the list below the linkroll in my sidebar.

Without further ado, here’s my list:

Akismet: Comment spain is a royal pain in the ass. Akismet saves you the hassle of wading through hundreds of spam comments. Any comments detected as spam are held in a spam queue for 15 days. You can chose to delete or unmark potential spam comments. Check the spam queue once a day, just to make sure that you have no false positives.

Autometa: Inserts META headers into your pages. Useful for serach engines crawling your blog.

Category Cloud Widget: Creates a cloud of your categories. The number of posts in each category determines its dominance in the cloud.

Category Tagging: Converts your categories into tags. Simple really. Also allows you to create a tag cloud.

DoFollow: Removes the “nofollow” attribute from links on your blog. “nofollow” tells search engines not to count the link from your page when determining the popularity of a site, which has a significant effect on a sites placement in search results.

FeedBurner Feed Replacement: FeedBurner is an alternative method of providing RSS feeds to your reader. Provides all sorts of statistics and extra functionality. This plugin forwards your feeds through FeedBurner without having to rewrite any code.

FireStats: Provides statistics on who’s visiting your site, most popular pages, unique visitors in the last 24 hours, etc. Uses a nice AJAX interface to reload the statistics every 5 minutes without reloading the entire page.

Google Sitemaps: Generates a sitemap for your blog whenever you save or edit a post. Automatically pings Google when the sitemap has been updated. Can also be used to manually generate a sitemap without saving or editing a post. A must if you want to improve your Google ranking.

Joe’s Quote Widget: Generates a random quote every time your site is loaded. Just one of those fun widgets to make your blog more interesting. Includes famous Bushisms, but Joe also provides Futrurama, Family Guy and Simpsons quotes.

runPHP: Allows you to embed PHP scripts in posts or pages, and have it run. Configurable so that only select users can insert scripts. Handy for creating pages with tag/ category clouds, etc.

Search Meter: Provides statistics on what users are searching for on your site. More importantly, also shows searches which return no results. If your readers are looking for something and can’t find it, it will let you know so that you can add it.

Sidebar Widgets: Enables Widgets in your blog. Opens up a whole new world. No more fiddling around with arcane code. Just drag and drop the widget onto your sidebar, and away you go.

Sociable: Add links to the bottom of your posts to submit to numerous social websites. Configurable for the websites that you want your material to be submitted to.

Tiger Style Administration: Cleans up the WordPress Administration Panel. Easier in the eye, and easier to navigate, and all done through the power of CSS.

Ultimate Tag Warrior: The ultimate in tagging, lots of configyration and administration options, supremely powerful. The best tagging plug-in out there. I particularly like the way it has a version number of pi. Just as powerful as pi, if you ask me.

Wordpress Database Backup: Sooner or later you ARE going to need this. No ifs, no ands, no buts. You will need it. First rule of WordPress: backup your database. Second Rule of WordPress: backup your database. Third Rule of WordPress: we don’t talk about the Third Rule…..

WordPress Mobile Edition: You want to reach a large an audience as possible with your blog. Now you can extend your thoughts to those browsing on mobile devices. With a browser sniffer, and a theme designed to display on mobile devices, you won’t go wrong with this plug-in.

WordPress Reports: View your Google Analytics and FeedBurner statistics straight from WordPress. You’ll need accounts with Google Analytics and/ or FeedBurner for this plug-in to have any use, but if you already have accounts with these services, then you know the power of information.

wp-cache: Speed up your blog with this caching plug-in. Creates static copies of your frequently visited pages, and serves those instead of your database intensive, dynamically created pages. May require minor editing of your wp-config.php file, but worth the effort.

WP-phpMyAdmin: Use this plugin to get direct access to your WordPress database. Optimise tables, drop tables if you like, but just be careful before you do.

WPG2: Embed photos from your Gallery2 installation directly into your blog. Can embed random or specific images and albums. According to the home page, not fully compatible with WordPress 2.1, but seems to be working ok here.

That’s it, that’s my list of plug-ins. I have a couple of more installed, but they’re not activated for various reasons. The main one being that I got fed up of them, and just haven’t gotten around to uninstalling them yet.

To change the default settings for the RSS feeds, I’ve installed a new plugin, Steve Smith’s FeedBurner Plugin. For those of you that prefer to use your own RSS reader for feeds, the link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/paulmc/dEhw