Some Great Plugins for Blogger!

This week started the Back to School, Back to Blogging challenge that is being hosted by Gigi over at Kludgy Mom and our reading and assignment was to find a plugin or widget and share what we've found about it.



When I first started looking around I didn't realize that there were so many choices for Blogger! There are a lot that are pretty useful ones depending on what you want to do with your blog and the information that you're writing about. There are also some pretty silly/odd ones that I wouldn't use. I don't need glittery, flashy content on my blog. Although my 8 year old daughter would love it!

I decided to share a couple of the plugins/widgets that I use and one that I'm considering using. These are probably pretty well known to many, but for me they weren't. And they're ones that I like and use daily.

The first plugin that I love to use is Zemanta. This tool helps with finding images, it finds articles related to the post that you're writing, it suggests labels, and they suggest your posts to others where appropriate. It was really easy to install and even easier to use! Also, you don't have to worry about copyright issues when using the images that they suggest.

Disqus is the next plugin that I just found and started using. This came about because when someone comments on my blog posts I have yet to figure out how to comment back directly instead of 3 or 4 comments below. It's hard to respond to each of the comments that people leave and because of this I went in search of something else to use and this is where Disqus came in. Now I can do exactly what I want and all I had to do was sign up and then click a couple of buttons to install. It was super easy! I was even able to import the comments already on my blog!

The last plugin/widget is one that I am pondering and it's for using different fonts with your posts. Blogger doesn't come with very many choices and I like more options even though I may not use them all the time. This site shows you how to add custom fonts to your blog, they recommend the Google API but there are 3 choices from which you can choose. It does appear that there are more steps to get this working, but nothing all that complicated from what I can tell. Hopefully this will do what I want!

Have you used any of these or have you found one similar that's better? Share your thoughts with me!