Wordpress is one of the greatest things that happened to the web. It makes blogging so much easier, and so much more powerful. Part of the thing that makes it so powerful is the ability to customize by adding plugins and themes. These are the first 10 plugins (and currently the only plugins) that I’ve used on my blog:

Adsense-Deluxe - Makes it easy to manage your Google AdSense (and Yahoo! PN) placements by using ad administration interface and putting tags where you want the ads to appear.

Akismet - This plugin comes with all Wordpress installations, but you need to register at Wordpress.com to get an activation key. This is a must plugin as it is used to filter out spam comments.

Digg This - This ads a “Digg This” button to your story if it gets Dugg. This can potentially help your story get more Diggs, which would allow it to get a better chance of making onto the Digg homepage.

Enhanced WP-Contact Form - A simple way to add a contact form to your page, rather than using your e-mail address.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Replace your standard feed and change it to Feedburner. This makes it much better to track subscribers.

Google Sitemaps - This will automatically generate a sitemaps XML file for Google to read. This way if you setup an account through Google Sitemaps, it will hopefully crawl through your pages more efficiently and faster to get pages into search results.

Related Posts - This generates a list of related posts to the post you are reading. It will obviously get readers to browse other parts of your site, especially helpful for new readers. The server to download this plugin has been down, so if you need it, contact me or maybe somebody will post a mirror link in the comments.

Sidebar Widget - Sidebar Widget is a great tool from an administration perspective. It allows you to easily adjust the data and order of information that you put on the sidebar of the site for templates that support it.

Sociable - Sociable is a plugin that puts in the “share” buttons at the bottom of a post so readers can submit something they like to sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us.

Subscribe To Comments - This is a plugin that allows users to subscribe to the comments for each individual post. It’s a great way to keep readers active and coming back to the site.

WP-Cache - This is a caching module which should help on days when traffic spikes, for example if a post is Dugg. One of the worst things that can happen is if you have the potential to have a high traffic day, and your server crashes. This will hopefully be part of the prevention solution.