Gracias.

Akismet – This is the MUST HAVE plugin. Even if you don’t get anything else up and running, anyone maintaining their own blog on their own domain should be running this amazing piece of anti-spam goodness. I just checked mine and deleted 39 spam comments today alone.

Spam Karma – I haven’t really ahd a huge problem with trackback spam. I have comments set up to automatically be e-mailed to me, but so far it’s just the random spam that makes it through Akismet; no trackback spam yet. I’m lucky though, as most of the Spam BLogs out there have just been using my domain name, and not the individual post URL that would create a trackback.

WP Contact – I hardcoded a basic HTML contact form using the tools provided by my hosting company. Then I just posted it into a permanent page on my blog which basically creates the same effect. They don’t see my e-mail (even if they look at the source code), and that’s one less plugin to update (might want to look into if you can do the same.

As for the rest, I’m interested to try out the Ultimate Tag Warrior, but I would be VERY careful about the number of “Related News” and “Post to “X” service” plugins. I recently read on the Tech-Recipes blog about having too much RSS “BLing” can really start to distract from the content. I already experience a minor bit of annoyance when someone says “more after the jump” in a post, and then makes me scroll through an ad, sometimes cleverly disguised as text that I start reading as though it were part of the actual post. Having too much Bling for posting at various sites, listing Related News, and other Links pertaining to the blog entry can approach seriously high levels of information overload.