As you may have noticed I’ve migrated this blog to WordPress.

I love the platform and have become an evangelist for it. I’ve always been a fan, but now I can be a fan from experience. My first order of business is to publicly thank Lloyd Budd, with the WordPress team, for graciously and flawlessly handling the import of years of blogging posts and comments and feed and permalink redirects that allowed my readers and the search engines to stay intact, seemingly without a hiccup.

Now on to one of the best aspects of the move - plugins, widgets and addons. WordPress has an army of developers out there making tools that allow WordPress users to enhance their blogs with useful (and sometimes goofy) additions to the base software.

There are lots of places to find these, including the WordPress site, but here’s a nice WordPress Plugin Database and make sure you also visit Weblog Tools Collection.

Here are some that I currently employ:
• Share This - allows readers to bookmark and send a post via email
• Related Content - Finds posts on my blog that are related to the current one
• Akismet - Flags comment spam for easy deletes
• Sphere - Finds related content around the web
• WP-Cache - Makes the blog load much faster

I will probably add more to showcase books and products and make comments more lively, but a word of caution, you can go overboard with too much bling, make sure your additions benefit your readers - don’t add spinning gizmos just because you can.

Now, WordPress users, tell me about your must have plugins.

6:56:23 PM    

The local classified ad space online is rapidly changing and potentially cutting into one of the remaining cash generators of the traditional newspaper.

Craig’s List currently dominates the free ad space but Facebook recently added free classified listings and now eBay just launched a free classified site called Kijiji.

Facebook and eBay have a long way to go to get any real traction with these offerings but, given the players involved, I would take a look at these new sites and see if they make sense for your business.

I would look for other social networking sites to take this direction as well. When this happens it will make it increasingly difficult to charge for these services.

6:56:20 PM