There are many, many WordPress plu­g­ins out there (WordPress has instruc­tions on how to install plu­g­ins). Here are my top rec­om­men­da­tions for the blog­ging lawyer/law student:

1. BackType Connect / IntenseDebate — BackType incor­po­rates Twitter men­tions into your com­ment stream.

It unfor­tu­nately is not yet com­pat­i­ble with another favorite plu­gin of mine called IntenseDebate, which adds com­ment thread­ing and other use­ful tools to the default com­ment func­tion­al­ity in WordPress. It can also syn­chro­nize with the basic WordPress sys­tem, so it is easy to turn on and off.

2. DB Cache + Hyper Cache — DB Cache speeds up data­base access by caching com­mon queries. Hyper Cache makes sta­tic ver­sions of Web pages (like WP Super Cache, but I’ve found it more focused and stream­lined in its approach). The com­bi­na­tion excels at reduc­ing server resource con­sump­tion and serv­ing the max­i­mum num­ber of vis­i­tors with the min­i­mum resource use.

3. Tweetable — Automatically sends your new post­ings to Twitter, with the nice bonus of adding your blog name to each post. So, for exam­ple, my post­ings say “via in pro­pria per­sona.” It also inte­grates Twitter into your WordPress dash­board, allow­ing you to eas­ily Tweet from within WordPress.

4. WP Greetbox — Adds a mes­sage auto­mat­i­cally to the top of your post­ings to encour­age vis­i­tors to sub­scribe, Stumble, etc. Visitors from Digg get an encour­age­ment to “Digg this,” those from StumbleUpon to “Stumble this,” etc.

5. Zemanta — While not per­fect, this is a must-have plu­gin that makes it easy to add con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion to your post­ings: pic­tures,  tags, and related links.

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