I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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A cou­ple of notes. First off, my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram has room for three more stu­dents. As a mem­ber, you can ask me unlim­ited ques­tions, one ques­tion at a time, which I will answer. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to be men­tored by me, personally.

Sec­ond, one of my stu­dents in my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram, asked: “Michel, I’m start­ing a blog using Word­Press. Do you have any gen­eral tips on things like lay­out, plu­g­ins, design, etc?”

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Nowa­days, it’s no longer a choice between the A and B piles. It’s no longer a choice between hun­dreds of sta­tions or chan­nels. It’s a choice between mil­lions if not bil­lions of options called “websites.”

But there’s some­thing else.

The Inter­net has mul­ti­plied not only the num­ber of options but also the num­ber of choices, too! (If you want a hint, think of those choices as “applications.”)

From mil­lions of web pages (as opposed to just hun­dreds of direct mail pieces, TV chan­nels or radio sta­tions), to var­i­ous deliv­ery meth­ods for each one (e.g., text, audio and video), to addi­tional appli­ca­tions that equally demand atten­tion (on the web as well as on a com­puter desk­top), a user’s choices have there­fore become expo­nen­tially more complex.

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Can­cer.

I’ve talked a lot about it on this blog of late, being breast can­cer aware­ness month and all, and given my wife’s cur­rent bat­tle. But this time, the kind of can­cer I’m refer­ring to is dif­fer­ent. And it’s shak­ing up the blo­gos­phere at its foundations.

I’m all for the small guy mak­ing it big. But when the com­pe­ti­tion, a “big guy” (owned by a For­tune 500 com­pany) starts call­ing you a can­cer on his per­sonal blog, you know that some­thing has cer­tainly gone amok.

It’s pretty con­tro­ver­sial, too. Large play­ers in the blo­gos­phere have their knick­ers in a twist about this — and I couldn’t resist talk­ing about it, and shar­ing my views.

Let’s enter the play­ground, kid­dies. Shall we?

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