The wonderful thing about a self-hosted WordPress blog is all of the magic you can do with plugins. Plugins are like little wrapped up bundles of code that add fun and functional things to your blog like social sharing buttons, spam filtering and mobile-friendliness. Plugins take about 5 seconds to install and most of them are free.  The good ones can make your blog run like a beautiful, will-oiled machine. Others can throw a wrench in your code and break stuff. So it’s best to tread carefully and rely on plugin recommendations from trusted sources.

Here are my favorite plugins for everything from comments to content:

[Update, November 2012: I updated this presentation a few months after BlogHer and presented it again on my friend Charlene's MomTV show, Charlene Chronicles. You can view a recording of my presentation here.]

[Update, January 2013: There is another updated and expanded version of this presentation here.]