Askimet – http://akismet.com/ and use your WordPress API key http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
aLinks – http://alinks.headzoo.com/ – Automatically links keywords
All in One SEO Pack – http://semperfiwebdesign.com/ – Add SEO techniques to your blog. Change your settings once, get the benefit each time.
cforms – http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
Google XML Sitemaps – http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/
Sociable – http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/
SRG Clean Archives – http://www.idunzo.com/projects/clean-archives/
**Replace Smart Archives on nickswitzer.net

Subscribe to Comments – http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
WWW Redirect – http://www.justinshattuck.com/wordpress-www-redirect-plugin/
WP-Cumulus – http://www.roytanck.com/2008/03/15/wp-cumulus-released
or Another Tag Cloud Program

Optional Plugins
FlickrRSS – http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/
Exec-PHP – http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/
LinkXL – http://www.linkxl.com/wp_plugin/ – for TLA

This is just a quick little list, if you have any questions or want some advice, please contact me.

• Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
  • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
• Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
  • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
  • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
• Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
  • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
• Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
  • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
• FireFTP – FTP client.
  • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
• IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
  • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
• SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
  • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
• User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
  • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.

First, let’s explore the options of accessing usenet.  There are usenet providers such as Giganews (which is a very large access provider) which offer different packages per month of download size ranging from a few GB to Unlimited downloads, as well as large retention rates of posts (up to 240 days!).  Retention rates are good so that if you are looking for something, you have a better chance of finding it if the access provider you have has higher retention.  Another thing to look for is whether they offer SSL connections.  Secure connections means that not everyone can look to see what you’re downloading (if someone was filtering your internet traffic). 

Secondly, we need to take a look at a newsreader.  There are many types, some free, some you pay for, which means there are different features.  Get one that suits your needs as you see fit.  I really like Newsleecher, but it is not free.  The benefit is that you can use their supersearch feature which will mean you do not have to update groups (this take awhile as some of them have over a million posts – each file is a post) in order to find something you are looking for.  An alternative to using their supersearch feature is a site I HIGHLY recommend called Newzbin.

Newzbin is great for several reasons.  First, it is very cheap to be a member of (I believe like a dollar a month), and having excellent filters for searching as well as easy organization of all files needed (many movies, etc. are broken into several files so you don’t have to download one LARGE file, but several small files – normally Winrar’s .rar compressed format).  These include the par2 files (use QuickPar to check to see if all the files you downloaded are not corrupt or if they are, to repair them).  Also, being a member there allows you to have access to their “Adult Material” site as I like to call it.  That would be NewzXXX which has the same features as their other site.

With that being said, read the comments on newzbin.com, if there are any, and download all the files into one .nzb (this will open with most newsreaders).  Then unpackage the files (many are .rar which you will use Winrar as previously mentioned) and enjoy!  If you download something and are not sure what program you will need to unpackage it or join it, either google it, check on filext.com (the file extension site), or go ahead and contact me.  Good luck hunting!