Mozilla Firefox works great on its own browser, but it’s the thousands of extensions that make it shine. I have pulled together about 10 add-ons which provide a quick access to handy blogging tools.

• Wordpress.com Sidebar - Adds a quick access sidebar to get to your WordPress.com account.
• Firefox Universal Uploader - Universal program for uploading to sites such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, and Facebook.
• FireFTP - It is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
• Adsense Notifier - Displays your current earnings from Google Adsense in the status bar.
• ShrinkThisLink Link Shrinker - Use the ShrinkThisLink service without leaving the page.
• StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
• ScribeFire Blog Editor - ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
• SEOpen - Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more.
• PayPerPost Opps Hider - Doesn’t it annoy you that PayPerPost opportunities can’t be hidden? There are tons that you can’t post or don’t want to take. With this extension you can easily hide PayPerPost opportunities by clicking a small checkbox.
• coComment - This extension allows you to activate coComment! from the right-click context menu and reduces your onscreen movement time so that you don’t have to move all the way from the comment text box to the Bookmarks and then back to the Submit

There are alot of social networking plugins for Wordpress CMS. But here are my top 5 favorite Social WordPress Plugins…

1. SimpleTwitter - It allows Wordpress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates. Once installed, the plug-in is used by adding the following call in a template.
2. ShareThis - This WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.
3. Stumble Reviews - Add the reviews that appear on StumbleUpon for a given page to be displayed on that page.
4. Digg Digg - Integrate Digg Button into Wordpress Content, Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg button.
5. Social Bookmarking RELOADED - Add the social bookmarks service’s icons to your articles in your blogs in order to submit them easily. Plugin based on Apostolos Dountsis one.

WordPress 2.5 introduces two new color schemes to your admin area: Classic and Fresh - If you dislike both, try JP Admin Stylish Blue. This plugin adds the additional color scheme "Stylish Blue" to your admin area. The custom style bases on the classic WordPress color scheme and was pimped up a little bit for more style, clearness and readability.

Screenshots 

Login Page

The Dashboard

Write Post

Manage Comments

General Settings

Download | JP Admin Stylish Blue

Do you want to place a comment counter on your blog? Now you can do so with Liz Strauss Comment Counter. It is a Wordpress Plugin. It is a highly configurable “Internet badge” that shows the number of comments your WordPress blog has. Use it either to show off how social your blog is, as an incentive for commenter’s to be part of it, or just because it’s fun. Apart from it’s easy to configure colors, typeface, and text to show.

Features:-

• Performance: the plugin generates a static image every time a comment is left (or an admin moderates one). The benefit is that, when showing the badge, nothing dynamic is generated on the fly by the webserver.
• Failover: if for some reason your server was not able to generate a static image (write permissions or whatever) the plugin falls back to generating the badge on the fly, so you always have something to show.
• Minimal overhead: state of the art code that loads only when needed, and the plugin adds a grand total of zero extra database query.
• Compatibility: the admin interface either runs as a widget (with no extra “Settings” page created) or as a traditional plugin.
• Flexibility: just like your Feedburner badge, except there’s more options!
• Neat interface: one click color presets, killer Farbtastic color picker, and cute FamFamFam icons
• Ready for translation: polyglots, a .pot file is included. If you happen to translate the plugin, be sure to send me your work so I can include it in the archive! (Please send your .mo and .po files to ozh at planetozh dot com)
• Fun: well yes, it’s just fun to show how many comments you have.

Screenshots of the admin interface

General view of the interface:

Super hot color picker :

Color presets if you’re not sure what colors to start with:

Download | Liz Comment Counter by Ozh

If you are running your blog from your own hosted website, most likely you will be using WordPress Platform. WordPress is great by itself, the majority of WordPress’ usefulness comes from its plugins and themes. Some of the best and most creative features come from plugins, and because plugins are so easy to create and install, there are literally thousands of WordPress plugins.

If you’re new to WordPress Platform, you will have difficulties in finding the appropriate plugin . Sometimes there are ten plugins doing the same thing, which makes it difficult to find the plugin which works the best. Or, you just simply don’t know that a plugin exists. That’s why I’m here to help. Here is the list of Top 10 Popular Wordpress Plugins for your site.

• All in One SEO Pack - Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• cformsII - contact form - cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin (& comment form).
• WordPress.com Stats - You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.
• Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• WP Super Cache - A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
• Wordpress Automatic upgrade - Wordpress automatic upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one.
• WP-PageNavi - Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.
• WP Ajax Edit Comments - Allows users and admin’s to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admin’s can edit all comments.
• WP-PostRatings - Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.