Inspired by yesterday's New York Times article "Some Bling for Your Blog", I put together a list of my favorite blog widgets:

• Swicki "Hot Searches" Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
• Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
• Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
• Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
• "What Am I Doing" Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
• Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
• Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
• "I'm online" Skype buttons (from Skype)
• del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
• Timelines (from MyTimelines)
• Link Count (from Technorati)
• Polls (from PollDaddy)
• Now Playing (from SIGamp)
• BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
• Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

• Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
• Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
• Recent Comments (recent comments in the sidebar)

Many more widgets listed in the Widgetoko and Widgetbox directories.

Just remember when "blinging" out your blog, not to overdue it. Think critically about the value to your reader of each badge / widget that you add, because it adds download time to your pages, which detracts from the user experience.

Any important blog bling that I missed?

Truer words have never been spoken.

Wanna know how "The gizzle has changed"? Well, then, read all about it!

haha, what a crack-up!

Now if only I could talk like that without the help of a tranzliatin' machine! ;-)

Even better is my blog tranzliat'd. I actually think it's an improvement. ;-) I challenge you to read a few entries without laughing! Be sure to read my post "Whizzay you NEED ta kizzle 'bout tha DMCA".

I'd like to offer my RSS subscribers with an RSS feed that's been run through Gizoogle. I feel a WordPress plugin comin' on! In fact, I think I will write that plugin right now!! Stay tuned...

Well I've done something I wasn't supposed to do. I sat down and wrote a plug-in for WordPress. I've been "encouraged" by my fellow executives at Netconcepts not to do any programming. "Leave that to the programmers" they told me. "Stick to the strategic planning stuff and the article writing and the conference speaking that you do so well." Did I listen? Well, no.

Their loss (I guess I'll have to work on that strategic plan document over the weekend!) is your gain. I've created a whizz-bang little WordPress plugin that solves all your SEO problems in one fell swoop. Well maybe not all. But it does make the title tags across your WordPress site or blog a heck of a lot more search engine optimal than they are by default.

Here's why you'll want it:

• Free & open source
• Allows you to override the title tag with a custom one (defined through a custom field in a post or a page)
• Allows you to define a custom home page title
• Reverses the order of the blog name and the title, or drop the blog name altogether, or replace it with a shorter nickname
• Puts the tag in the title of (UltimateTagWarrior) tag pages
• Uses the category's description as the title on category pages
• Has an Options page in the admin to change settings

Who could say "No" to all that?!

Here's where to get it: SEO Title Tag

I'm open to suggestions for further improvements to the plugin. This is my first plugin, and this is a 1.0 release, so please be gentle!

I've posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you're blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.

The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.

That's not quite 20, so I'll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to "migrate" your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).