Ever wonder how those really sexy looking tag cloud animations are made?
If you are running a WordPress site, the easy answer is WP-Cumulus, a plugin that automatically generates a flash based, interactive animation using the tags you have assigned to your blog posts.
You can set all of the dimensions, colours and rotation speed through the back-end administration page, and can even utilise it as a widget for sidebars and footers.

It is difficult to express how important it is today to backup your work and your website is no exception.
Security threats are constant and accidents can happen.
A tedious task to be sure and something everyone would prefer was automated and invisible.
Fortunately for WordPress users, an extremely simple to use plugin is available that I recommend to everyone, and that is BackWPup.
Install it, activate it, select a backup location option and Robert’s your mothers brother!

If you run a WordPress site which allows visitors to comment on your content, then you know how big a problem online spam can be.
Fortunately there is a solution, and that is called Akismet.
Akismet is a hosted web service that saves you time by automatically detecting comment and trackback spam.
It comes preloaded into WordPress as a plugin but many people overlook what is one of the most valuable features at their disposal.

Login Lockdown has become a part of my standard WordPress install now, it is THAT GOOD!
It records the IP address and time-stamp of every failed login attempt to your site and If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a specific period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.
Acting as a firewall for your website, it helps to prevent brute force password discovery.