These are pretty bare-bones tools, though. While WordPress’ RSS feeds are fine for your readers, WordPress doesn’t offer any tools to track how many subscribers you have, or to list the number of comments, or to add links for social networking sites so that, for instance, your reader can bookmark your latest post on del.icio.us. Likewise, while a reader can leave a comment on your blog, they have no way of knowing if anyone has responded — other than obsessively reloading your page over and over — which stunts the development of ongoing conversations with and between your readers.

Here are two plugins that add another dimension to how readers can interact with your site. The first is the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, which allows you to redirect your site’s RSS feed through Feedburner. Feedburner is a free online RSS feed service that offers a number of features to its users, including a subscriber count (which can be extremely difficult and even impossible to find using your webhosts stats log), the ability to insert ads into your feed, and “Feedflare”, which inserts your post’s comment count, plus links to add to del.icio.us, Digg, and other social networking services.

You’ll need to sign up for a Feedburner account first (it’s free). You’ll be asked to provide your site’s RSS feed, and will then be provided with a new Feedburner feed address (it looks like “feeds.feedburner.com/yourusername” or something similar). Once you’ve installed the plugin, you insert your new Feedburner address into the plugins configuration page, and hit “Save”. Now, you can add whatever Feedburner features you want (and there are a ton more than I’ve described) and they’ll automatically show up in your readers’ feeds. What’s more, any existing RSS subscribers you have will be automatically and transparently redirected to the new feed — they won’t even notice.

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows your visitors to receive email notifications whenever someone adds a comment to a post they’ve already commented on. Let’s say someone asks a question, or leaves an angry rebuttal of another commenter’s comment — it stands to reason they’d want to know if a response was made. Without Subscribe to Comments, they’re stuck revisiting the page, until they forget or lose interest.

What Subscribe to Comments does is add a checkbox below their comment saying “Notify me of any responses to my comment” (or whatever text you choose). Readers who comment this will get an email whenever someone adds a new comment in the future. (It also allows the option to subscribe even if you don’t leave a comment.) This encourages them to revisit your site and, hopefully, to continue the conversation they started with their earlier comment. Not only does this help foster a sense of community, it raises the comment count — which will attract even more readers to look at the comments and, hopefully, leave more. And so it goes — building community depends on this sort of “snowball effect”, where the impact of 10 comments is far more than 10 times the impact of one comment.

Fortunately, there are several WordPress plugins that help minimize, and often eliminate entirely, spam from your comments section. The first, Akismet, is even built in. You need to activate it, though — and for that you need a “Wordpress API key”. Fortunately, that’s easy enough to get — just sign up for an account at WordPress.com and they’ll send you one by email, automatically. It’s a long string of characters that, after you’ve activated Akismet, you’ll be asked to enter. Just cut-and-paste it from the email.

Akismet works by aggregating the collective judgment of its users. Every comment on an Akismet-enabled site is fed through their servers and compared with their profiles of known spam. If a new comment on your site looks like a piece of spam in Akismet’s database, it’s flagged as “spam” (you can look occasionally and make sure it’s all properly flagged, and un-flag comments you think should not be considered spam). If it looks kosher to Akismet, it’s sent back to your site. If something “spammy” gets through Akismet, you can manually flag it as spam, and Akismet will add it to their database. When you mark something as spam, it helps the rest of the network; when anyone else on the network marks something as spam, it helps you.

What Akismet is to comment spam, the Trackback Validator plugin is to trackback spam. Normally, trackbacks are notifications sent to your site when a trackback-enabled site links to your site. It’s a nice way to let someone know you’re linking to them, and it posts a link under the post they linked to so that other readers can click through and see the conversation unfold. Unfortunately, a lot of scummier sorts have hijacked the process, sending fake trackbacks to sites just to get the link. Trackback Validator checks the address the trackback links to, to make sure there really is a page there and it really does link to you, before letting the trackback show up on your site.

The third line of defense against spam is Bad Behavior, which aims to stop spam at the source by identifying “bad guys” before they can reach your site. Bad Behavior looks at the way that a visitor or alleged visitor is attempting to access your site. Since most comment spam, trackback spam, and other malicious attacks against your site are carried out by automated programs accessing the site directly (as opposed to a person accessing it via a browser), they can often be identified and, in Bad Behavior’s case, prevented from being able to access the site at all.

All three of these plugins can be used together, giving you a pretty good defense strategy against the kind of scum that has decided that your site is a great platform for whatever malicious purposes they have in mind. Once installed, the only thing you have to do is remember to check your spam queue once in a while (the WordPress dashboard will let you know how many comments are in the spam queue and need to be approved or marked as spam) to make sure you catch anything Akismet missed — which should be less and less, since Akismet is learning faster and faster the more people use it.