Apart from a widget that puts a login form onto a blog sidebar, I am not really on the lookout for WordPress plug-ins, but here are two that came to my attention recently. I have found them to be useful; maybe you will too.
The first is WordPress Admin Themer. This allows you to store wp-admin.css in your blog's theme folder, out of harm's way from future upgrade cycles. A neater way of otherwise storing your customisations of admin pages, I keep changing the logout destination to the front page of my blogs, would be a bonus, but the style plug-in is a good step forward.
A possible use to which I was going to put WordPress Admin Themer was to hide some elements of the WordPress dashboard page, but I happened across another plug-in that does just this kind of thing: Dashboard Editor. Activating this gets you an extra admin page where you can select the components that you want to see using the tick (check) boxes. You can even take things further by having your very own dashboard instead of what WordPress offers, or by activating widgets for using with your dashboard. It's all good stuff and I have got rid of extraneous pieces such as Planet News and the getting started section (I have using WordPress long enough that I should know my way around by now...).
I found this WordPress plug-in called Popularity Contest while looking for something else, always the best way to find things. Come to think of it, I can't remember what I was looking for. Anyway, the plug-in polls the popularity of your posts, a very useful piece of information, not that it should deflect from writing about those things about you want to write...
The Windows command has always been the poor relation of its UNIX equivalent, and it appears that Microsoft released PowerShell to remedy this. It seems to offer scripting possibilities beyond what is already available on Windows, and is a free download for XP and Vista. I haven't got to exploring its potential yet, but it is on the to-do list.
On my other blog, a WordPress one that I have hosted myself, I have added the FireStats plug-in so that I can get some idea how many are paying it a visit. It has definitely been useful. It tells you referrer, operating system and browser information as well as what has been visited. While I know that I can look at my server logs to get this information, this is so much easier, and it can be extended to non-WordPress PHP-powered pages too.
Hansel and Gretel Breadcrumb is another plug-in that I have spotted, but given that the blog is set up, it didn't look that useful. If it could be extended to my non-blog pages, à la FireStats, that would be a much more useful situation.
I have just spotted an interesting behaviour in the Recent Posts section on the left sidebar here: the space between the penultimate and final words in a heading is the HTML entity for a non-breaking space, rather than a real space. That means that a browser sees the two words as one rather than two strings and has consequences for text wrapping of these last two words in the phrase. The workaround is to watch the lengths of the last two words, but why things were set up the way that they are in the first place is beyond me.
A BBC reporter logs his impressions of Vista over a 24-hour period. A frequent Mac user, he comes away impressed.
Update: I have seen a post somewhere that slates the BBC for being pro-Microsoft; personally, I doubt that they are any more biased than anyone else out there in the media. Maybe the gripe comes from a Linux or Mac fan...