• WYSIWYG Comments Trix:
  Replaces the standard comment submission form with a WYSIWYG rich-text editor. A bunch of you said this was a bad idea, because 64KB should be enough for anybody.

• Geolocate Comments:
  Saves and displays (to me) the location of each commenter's IP address. Hello to all my friends in the Russian bot farm industry!

• Mirror Gravatar:
  Mirrors commenters' Gravatars and serves them locally, rather than loading them from gravatar.com on each page load, thus both speeding things up and eliminating an off-site webbug.

They join in infamy my previous two plugins:

• Base64 Shortlinks: which is, I suppose, mostly useless, and
• Herp Derp: which is absolutely essential.

FYI, the other plugins that I still use are:

• Akismet Spam Protection, which, while not as essential as Herp Derp, is still pretty essential.

• Comments Like Dislike, which gives you those little thumbs.

• Heavily hacked versions of Comment Reply Notification and HTML Emails, which I have Frankensteined together. They're both kind of bad and maybe one day I'll rewrite them.

• PubSubHubbub, which, I'm not even sure what this does any more. It predates sitemaps, so maybe it's useless now?

For a long time I used WP Super Cache, but I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth. It was far too agressive at showing people out-of-date pages, and I think that since I started using CloudFront as a CDN for my images and videos, it's a lot less necessary. I guess we'll find out the next time I say something that makes the techbro hordes invade.

Separating out these plugins made me marvel at how long my wp-content/themes/jwz/functions.php file has gotten over the years, due to the inevitable accretion. What all is in there? Let's conduct an inventory, mostly for my own benefit:

Theme stuff:

• Colors, scripts, sidebars widgets.
• A bunch of permalink-canonicalization crud.
• Hacked the "Archives" sidebar widget to go into "year mode" after a few months, instead of listing 200+ months.
• Show relative dates on posts and comments.
• Move the login fields above the text area instead of below (what were they thinking?)

Disable misfeatures:

• Tear the legs off of "wpautop", "wptexturize", and all the emoji crap.
• Disable "Gutenberg", "XML-RPC", and "JSON REST".
• Disable "categories" as much as possible.
• Search results by date, not some nebulous "relevance".

Images:

• Filters to move images and videos into the CDN.
• Locally mirror images posted in comments.
• Auto-generate IMG SRCSETs, dependent upon my image scaler. WordPress kind-of handles this thing internally if you use their built-in image uploader, but I don't, because reasons.

Search and social media crud:

• Add OpenGraph and Twit metadata properly.
• Remove "users" and "taxonomies" from sitemaps.
• Keep year and month indexes out of search engines: link to leaf nodes only.
• Omit sidebars and comments and such from the version of the site seen by search engines. I know they hate that, but it makes the search results better.
• Auto-crosspost to Twitter and sometimes Instagram.

Other random features:

• Added an option to hide all comments on particular posts, without actually deleting them.
• Added an option to mark particular posts as search-engine-noindex.
• Better HTML-to-plaintext conversion for RSS feeds and multipart/alternative emails. This is useless but it's the principle of the thing.

Relatedly, I also re-organized my hacks/ page for the first time in over a decade.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.