Anyone knows how great WordPress is. But few people know that it can be better. WordPress supports a large variety of plugins that can enhance your blogging experience, that can improve your blogs’s performance or plugins that simply make your life a lot easier. We selected only a few in this release, giving you a 10 must-install plugins list. Download, install, activate, try and let us know your opinion about them. Enjoy and happy blogging!

1. Akismet
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) WordPress Plugin is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue, so you never have to worry about spam again.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

2. podPress
The podPress pluggin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

3. Technochrati Tagging
Allows you to use Technorati tags (http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html) in your blog entries by adding a custom field to blog posts. Also allows for tag listings (http://www.technorati.com/tags/) to be added to your website.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

4. Flexible Upload
Flexible Upload is a plugin for WordPress 2.0.x and 2.1.x to enhance the image upload functionality. It resizes pictures to a specific dimension, creates custom-sized thumbnails, adds an optional watermark signature, and other options
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

5. Google Analytics
The Google Analytics plugin for WordPress lets you easily add Google’s web tracking script to your WordPress powered site.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

6. Mighty AdSense
It will allow you to host the code in WordPress without having to modify the templates. Google Ads are displayed in post item and you can specify how many blocks are going to show up in a page. Ads preview tool is included in the control panel.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

7. WordPress Video Plugin
This plugin will let you embed Flash Videos (flv) in your WordPress posts/pages. It supports YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, MyspaceTV, Yahoo! Video… and many others!
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

8. WordPress-phpMyAdmin
This is a simple plugin that will allow you direct access to your WordPress database through phpMyAdmin within your WP admin console. No need to deal with phpMyAdmin setup and login and settings are taken from your WP settings.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

9. Search Pages
This plugin lets your visitors search through posts and pages instead of only posts.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

10. WP-Print 2.11
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
Download Plugin | Plugin Demo

Here is a great collection of Firefox Extensions for webmasters:

1. Web Developer 1.1.4

This Extension adds a toolbar with some great features for easily editing the CSS, work on the accessibility of your site and other cool features. Get it here!

2. Firefox Accessibility Extension 1.01

Firefox Accessibility Extension makes it easier for people with a disability to view and navigate webpages, but it also helps developers to check the accessibility of their pages. Get it here!

3. SeoQuake 2.0.4

SeoQuake is huge, i use it every single day and it saves me a lot of time. This Extension basically adds a toolbar in the corner of the websites and with the push of a button it expands giving you almost instant information about the way search engines view and index that website, along with statistics from Alexa and other great features for the webmaster that works with Search Engine Optimisation. Also every time you search for something in Google, Yahoo or Msn you’ll get the same statistics under every result. Get it here!

4.Total Validator 4.1

Provides true HTML validation (HTML 2.0 to XHTML 1.1) using the official DTDs, plus added attribute checking. So you no longer have to put up with the limitations of the W3C validator (no type checking) and tools like HTML Tidy which interpret the standards incorrectly (they don’t use the official DTDs).

Also performs accessibility validation (WCAG, US-508), broken link checking, spell checking (5 languages), and takes screenshots using 24 browsers on Windows, Linux, and OS/X. Get it here!

5. KGen 0.2.1

KGen retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears on her and their weight in the page (a word in the title of a page has a stronger weight than a word in a paragraph).

So, you can easily know how to optimize your pages, know what’s the secret of your competitors or simply know what’s the main subject of a webpage.

You can also select some words and transfer them to your clipboard and paste them on tag fields on your favorite social network or fill meta-keywords of your web pages.

To open the KGen sidebar : View>Sidebar>KGen. Get it here!

6. IE Tab 1.3.3.20070528

We all know how frustrating and time consuming is to edit your page especially the CSS file to make your site display correctly in IE as well as in Firefox, this Extension gives you an embedded IE in a new tab!

This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. Get it here!

7. Yet Another Window Resizer 1.1

This Extension helps you view your web page in several resolutions. Get it here!

8. MeasureIt 0.3.6

Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage. Get it here!

9. Clear Cache Button 0.5

Adds a clear cache toolbar button. After installing the extension, find the clear cache button in the toolbar customization panel. YES, this is an extension for the very lazy webmaster! Get it here!

10. Font Finder 0.5a

Simply highlight a single element (e.g. a paragraph or a strong tag ), right-click and select `Font Finder`, then marvel as the full CSS text styling of the selected element appears. Get it here!

XUL was developed by Mozilla to use for its cross-platform apps like FireFox. XUL was developed for creating UI for apps just like DHTML is used for web page interface. The only complete implementation of XUL can be found in the Gecko layout engine. XUL basically relies on existing web technologies like CSS, JavaScrips and DOM which makes it reasonable easy to master if you have a background in web programming and design.

A XUL interface is typically defined to consist of three discrete sets of components:

• Content: The XUL document(s), whose elements define the layout of the user interface.
• Skin: The CSS and image files, which define the appearance of an application.
• Locale: The files containing user-visible strings for easy software localization.

Drawbacks of XUL:

• The main drawback is the lack or message when errors occurs. The interface just does not display.
• Using RDF to fill widgets is rather difficult.
• Using XPCom, XPConnect is more difficult again.

You can go as deep and you want into XUL on Mozilla’s Introduction to XUL.

Web pages often include headers, footers, navigational sections,
repeated boilerplate text, copyright notices, ad sections, or dynamic
content that is useful to users — but not to search engines. Webmasters
can apply the “robots-nocontent” attribute to indicate to search
engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of
the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class=”robots-nocontent” present
on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others.

When a “robots-nocontent” tag is used to mark a section of content
on a web page, Yahoo! will not use the terms contained in that section
as information for finding the page or for the abstract of that page in
search results. Note: Using a “robots-nocontent” tag to mark explicit
sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all the
content on the page is available to us (unlike “cloaking” where we may
be served content that is different from what users see.)

The “robots-nocontent” tag is a useful tool for webmasters.

Applying the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:

Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

Technorati Tags: Seo, search engine optimization, search engines, yahoo, yahoo slurp, nocontent tag, web site optimization for search engines

After you download WordPress unzipp the downloaded file and use the readme file to install it(it’s really simple)!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog scripts how to make your own blog, blogger.com,

Frankly i can’t even imagine what will result from this deal, i don’t believe that the joined entities will have more chances in defeating the huge Google and thinking about the fact that Microsoft is working it’s butt off to develop the famous AdCenter for over a year now and no serious things got out of it makes me believe that it would be a $50billion deal down the drain. We’ll just going to wait and see what will happen!

Before you start the design process you must think what is your site’s target audience and it’s browsing habits. It’s very important for the success of your website to follow in the design the taste of your audience, they are the one that dictate the design, not you!

2. The theme of your site

Your visitors must know what your site is about after a few second look at it or after reading the first paragraph of the main page (the index). If you are selling a product it must be crystal clear what kind of product that is, or if you have multiple products you must dedicate a page for each product instead of one page for all products.

3. The speed of browsing

We are in the speed age, everyone is in a hurry so waiting for a website to load is not what visitors want. Make sure your visitors actually see your site in 10-15 seconds if you expect them to spend their precious time on your website.

4. K.I.S.S.

This is what we like to call Keep It Simple Stupid. Your site’s navigation must be intuitive, allowing your viewers to find what they are looking for very easy and without having to cross their eyes. If the point of interest is hard to find on your website, the competition is 3 clicks away. Keep that in mind and Keep It Simple.

It’s been a while since you could get a good ranking without making any optimization for the search engines, according to a study by JUPITER MEDIA MATRIX about 55% of all web purchases start with a search engine, and 93% of those don’t go deeper than page 2, so you’ll need to target your keywords and make sure your ranking for those keyword searches are high enough to actually be found.

6. Accessibility

Making your site accessible you can reach all the market and all types of visitors, making your business prosper. You can find all the info you need about website accessibility on the W3C page!

7. Compatibility

Internet Explorer still holds a big share of the browsers market, but even so your website must look the same on any browser. The new mobile devices became more and more internet compatible and more and more used for browsing and it’s a good market to keep in mind and to keep close. Again, all the info you need can be found in W3C’s Standards validity check page.

8. Content

Content is King, everybody says so i know! If you want a high search engine ranking you must feed the SE spiders with unique content, you can design you site to look good with graphics but spiders are not people, they love text! Each page should have 2-3 keywords and enough content to keep the SE spiders happy!

Technorati Tags: SE marketing, How to build a better website, Search engine optimization, Internet marketing, webmasters