On Father’s day, perhaps it might be a nice idea to check out some sites and forums dedicated to dads. Here are 8 of them.

GreatDad - A popular site for advice for dads. Good lists of resources.

DadDaily - A social networking site for dads.

DadStaysHome - A forum for dads to share their daddyhood experiences.

AtHomeDad - A resource and community for stay-at-home dads.

BrandNewDad - A social networking site for new and expectant dads.

Dadosphere - Another social netowrking sites only for dads.

JustDaddys - Another forum only for dads.

The DadLabs Crib - This is a dad’s community at Ning.

There are hundreds of Wordpress plugins out there and you can use as many as you want. However, there are some plugins that are must-used for all. This is  a list of 11 such plugins that you just can’t live without.

In no particular order…

Akismet - This plugin that seemingly seem to do nothing visible has protected my blogs from over thousands of spam comments. Need I say more.

You need your Wordpress.com API key to activate akismet. You can get it by registering at Wordpress.com and by going to your profile page.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Sooner or later, you are going to burn your blog’s feed on Feedburner, and when you do that, this plugin will make sure all the default Wordpress feeds of your blog points to the Feedburner feed. For example, http://advocable.com/feed will always point to the Feedburner feed - http://feeds.advocable.com/newposts

Google Sitemaps - Ah! Who wouldn’t want to use Google Sitemaps. This plugin creates that necessary sitemap for your Wordpress blog effortlessly.

Wordpress Mobile Editon - Today, people are increasingly using mobile phones to browse the net, and you don’t want your site to look garbled on their handsets. This plugin displays the content of your blog in a mobile phone screen friendly format that is easy to browse and read.  this is one of those just-installed-and-forget-it plugins.

Maintenance Mode - When you are fidling with the design and layout of your blog, you don’t want your visitors to see you site all crippled. Right? This plugin will display a simple note to your site visitors saying your blog is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and so please try back after some time. You, as the admin, can continue to work and see how your site actually looks like on screen.

Subscribe to Comments - When I comment on blog post, I ask questions and give my views on a particular topic and expect the post author or other readers to reply to my comment. Now since I can’t be bookmarking or remembering all the comments that I keep making, I’d love it if the replies are somehow sent to me. This plugin does exactly that by giving me the option of subscribing to the follow-up comments when I am leaving a comment on a blog. For a blogger, this is a good way to keep their readers engaged.

Wordpress.com Stats - Now there are so many stat providers like Google Analytics, Sitemeter, Statcounter, Woopra, and more, but I haven’t seen any that is quite as nice as this one. Though not quite so comprehensive, this plugin provides all the key stats you need to know about your blog on your Wordpress dashboard itself. No need to add any javascript that will slow down your blog’s page loading.

All-in-One SEO Pack - This plugin is no longer supported but is still one of the best out there to ensure that your post titles, descriptions, and keywords are in place, duplicate content are in check, and other on-site SEO optimisation is done.

Similar Posts - You can use this plugin to display a list of 5-10 or more similar posts below your blog posts. This helps in atrracting your readers to other similar content on your blog and perhaps make them stay longer on your site.

Popularity Content - This plugin helps you to display a list of the most popular posts on your blog based on certain criteria you have set. Displaying such list is important as your visitors know what are the best your blog has to offer.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade -  Wordpress keeps updating itself to new versions every now and then, and who would have the time and patience to delete some folders from the server, upload the newer versions, and take care that nothing is wrong in all these deleting and uploading. And plus the reinstallation. You can escape all this by getting this plugin do the upgrading for you automatically.

We bloggers always try to leave little bit of information of our blogs at popular sites where Internet goers and other bloggers frequent in a bid to get some of the traffic from that site.

This is one such new site that is going to become popular soon, and this is from Blogger itself. Called Blogger Play, this site will stream stream images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. Visitors to the site can also ‘click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it.’

Well well, so if you keep posting interesting pictures with your posts on your Blogger posts from now on, chances are that people visiting Blogger Play might get tempted enough to click on it and visit your site. How’s that for a little thought?

If you use the Blogger ‘Header’ Page element to add an image in your header in your Blogger blog, and your image doesn’t show up in Internet Explorer, a simple placement option choice could be the solution.

For instance, I’m using a logo picture instead of the header title and description in this blog. (See header above).

Remember in the ‘Configure header’ pop up window, there are two options of how you can add an image - from your computer, and from the web. Choose the second option.

I tried this in some test blogs and found that if I upload a logo picture on the blogs directly from my computer, sometimes the pictures wouldn’t show up in Internet Explorer. However, if upload the logo picture on the web somewhere (like Google Page Creator) and link to it, it would somehow always show up in Internet Explorer as well as in Firefox. Maybe this will work for others too.

If you are on the new Blogger, then you might be wondering how to display your latest posts on your sidebar. The old Blogger used to allow a display of upto 10 of the last posts. Now the new Blogger doesn’t have any such feature.

You can run your blog feed through the Feed Page Element and have the latest 5 posts on display. But 5?? Those five might already be there on your blog mainpage.

So we using Blogger blogs are often searching around on the web how to display at least 10 or more of our latest posts on the sidebar. Of course this is not a new discussion and many experts have written about it. There are hacks by Hoctro, Hackosphere, and Beautiful Beta.

However if you do not want all that modifications in the above hacks, there is another way to get the last 15 (or all) posts using Feedburner BuzzBoost. Of course you need to using Feedburner for this.

What is BuzzBoost? According to Feedburner, BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML. To set this up, log in to your Feedburner account, go to the ‘Publicise’ tab, choose ‘BuzzBoost’, and follow the instructions there, and activate the service. On the page that followed, copy the html code into your blog where you want the latest posts to appear.

There are some customisation options available with this service. For instance, you can set the number of items to display, option of displaying the item author name, displaying parts of the item contents, etc. There are instructions given there on how you can apply your own styles. To see a live example, check out the ‘Latest posts’ column at the bottom of this blog.

By the way, I’m not a techie and this is just an alternative I discovered, and thought might be useful to someone.