I have not noticed much of a delay with commentluv - and I think the benefits outweigh that. I do also use the cocomment firefox extension to keep track of my comments and replies so I probably already have a delay from that and am not noticing much of a difference.

So far, the only one I’ve installed from your list is nofollow but I do plan to install more of them.

I haven’t personally noticed any slow down. As I wrote on here before, I did notice a significant increase in speed in my blog loading times when I installed the K2 theme (as opposed to the mostly personalised one I had previously). Having said that, I haven’t tested the site with no plugins so it may be a few seconds faster without them!

The only thing I will say is any plugin that pre-loads something - for example, ShareThis, or Twitter if you use their plugin - can stall a page if the site that it is loading from is down or slow. You can get around this by putting their loading code into your footer, while leaving the ‘display’ part where you have it now (i.e., your sidebar, or whatever you want it.)

Thanks for your comment.

Sheamus

I installed and removed Simple Tags because from what I could (admittedly fairly quickly) tell is that it seemed unnecessary/overkill with WP 2.5 (and the SEO pack). It may do some wonderful things I overlooked - perhaps you could expand on why you use it?

I’ve had my Twitterings on my sidebar twice now but always removed it after a week or two. It never seems to ‘fit’ in with the feel of my blog. Even though I use Twitter to promote some of the stuff on here (which of course also looks a bit rubbish when that shows up on the blog as well) I kind of feel like they’re two very different things.

As for Comment Luv, I like that on other sites and have considered it myself, but on so many of them it seems to stall the message you are posting (while it searches for your last blog comment) that I wondered if it might be offputting for some users. It definitely provides a nice feature for posters, though, and I may give it a go!

Thanks for your comment,
Sheamus

Amazon Simple Admin - to easily embed product links in posts and can use your assiciates ID

Photo Dropper - search flickr for creative commons photos for your posts w/in the wordpress editor. I may, however, remove this because I don’t like the code it creates.

RSS Stream - create a lifestream from your social networks.

Simple Tags - enhanced tagging functionality

Twitter Tools - integration between blog and twitter. Can use it post tweets in sidebar and can also use to send new posts to twitter when published.

Comment Luv - will link back to a commenter’s last blog post. I haven’t installed this one yet but am going to

@ Sharon - I’ll check out Better Comments Manager. Thanks!

@ Joost - Oops, it doesn’t! What can I say - I’ve been tired. I’ll fix that.

@ Peter - Likewise, I’ve never heard of a few of yours either. I’ll be checking out WP Google Analytics and Feedburner Feedsmith for sure!

Here’s my list:

Akismet
All in One SEO Pack
AutoMeta
cforms
Clean Archives Reloaded
FeedBurner FeedSmith
Google XML Sitemaps
In Series
JAW Popular Posts Widget
No Self Pings
Plain Text Paste
Popularity Contest
Wordbook
WP-Amazon
WP Google Analytics
WP_DeliciousPost