Alex King is responsible for a lot of great WordPress plugins but one of my favorites is his simple 404 Notifier.
404 Notifier is an admin-side plugin that logs any 404 errors your visitors encounter while visiting your blog.
The neat part of 404 Notifier is that you can subscribe to a special RSS feed that will automatically notify you of any new 404 errors.
This week’s WordPress plugin is great for those of you looking to integrate free photography into your blog posts.
With PhotoDropper you can browse Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr based on keywords and attach them to your blog posts.
This sounds really good but there’s a catch. PhotoDropper automatically includes a credit link to the photographer (which is fine) but it also includes a link back to the PhotoDropper site with the anchor text “photo” next to the credit link.
So if you think that’s a bit shady you might want to look elsewhere for photos for your blog. I always recommend stock.xchng.
I’ve decided to launch a newsletter to compliment my posts here. Jack’s Newsletter will offer web development tips, WordPress news and thoughts on 
freelancing that won’t appear on this blog. I’ll be running all of my future contests to members of the newsletter as well.
As an incentive to subscribe and to help promote the launch, I’m going to be giving away a Single-Use License for the popular Premium News Theme for WordPress to one of the newsletter’s verified subscribers. It’s free to subscribe so you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up.
In fact, I’ve made it really easy by including the sign up form right here:
I’ll be picking the winner of the free premium WordPress theme at midnight on March 7th, 2008. Feel free to tell everyone you know about the contest and have them subscribe to Jack’s Newsletter for their chance to win.
This week’s plugin is called Redirection. This plugin simplifies the process of building 301 Redirects by creating an easy to use interface within WordPress for updating your blog’s .htaccess file. This is great for affiliate marketers who want to hide their affiliate links.
Another nice feature of Redirection is its 404 monitoring. It will track the 404 errors your blog generates so that you can then create redirects for them. That’s pretty slick.
If you’re interested, head on over to the Redirection page for a list of even more features and help installing and running the plugin (including a video tutorial).
Credit for this week’s WordPress Plugin of the Week goes directly to Viking Blogger. He wrote a post about it recently that I just read this morning.
This week’s plugin is CommentLuv which is a slick little idea to give people more incentive to comment on your site.
After someone leaves a comment, CommentLuv will visit that person’s RSS feed and attach a link to the latest post on their blog.
This is a nice way to give your visitors a chance to get a backlink to their site. I’m going to use CommentLuv here for a little while and see if it has any positive effect on the number of comments my posts receive.
