I use plugins on my WordPress sites too, of course. Here are the top 10 apps that I use every day and that I think will help any tech blog:

*AdSense Now: There are other plugins for adding ads to WordPress, but if your tech site works with AdSense, I suggest this one. Ad blocks can go in any of the three parts of a post, on the left, in the middle, or in the middle. You can also turn off ads on certain pages, like archives, topic pages, tag pages, and so on.

*Audio Player: It can be hard to add podcasts or mp3 clips to your blog. This is easier to do with the Audio Player plugin. All you have to do is use FTP to create a music folder on your website and then add MP3 files to that folder. You only need one line of code to add the built-in music player to any of your posts or pages. It is easy, quick, and doesn't hurt.

*Facebook Sharecount: It's no secret that social networking sites like Facebook are great for building an audience, but to use this power to your advantage, you need a simple way to spread your great content. With Facebook Sharecount, your users can easily share your posts and keep track of your content.

*Foliopress Descriptions: When your tech blog has hundreds or even thousands of posts, you'll need a way to change the descriptions for all of them at once. Meta descriptions may or may not be important, but I think each post should have a scribbled summary. Foliopress Descriptions works with the post excerpt, These, and All In One Seo meta description areas.

*Google XML Sitemaps: If you read my previous article on how to get found by Google and Yahoo, you know how important it is to have a sitemap. This tool helps search engines understand what's on your tech blog and makes an XML file of your sitemap. Google XML Sitemaps will take care of the rest once the plugin has been installed and turned on.

It can be hard to keep track of your images and photo albums, but NextGen Gallery makes it easy. NextGEN Gallery is an important tool because it lets you do things like auto-resize, add watermarks, make thumbnails, and add gallery effects.

*Review Star Rating: If you have a tech blog, people may ask you to review things. A good review should be both informative and interesting to look at. Star Rating for Reviews lets you rate the different parts of the goods you're reviewing. Then, you can take the average of those ratings to get a final score. The tool can be used in many ways and is a must-have for anyone who likes technology.

* TweetMeme Retween Button: On TechBlogStartup, there is a yellow Retweet button to the right of each post. Making it easy for your readers to ReTweet great content could be very helpful, especially since Twitter's reach grows every day. If you have Google Analytics installed, as I explained in a previous post, you can keep track of how many people come to your story from Twitter. If you're wondering why ShareThis isn't there, it's because I added the code by hand instead of using a Wordpress Plugin.

*WP Super Cache: If you've heard of Digg, you've probably heard of the Digg Effect, in which a website's server crashes because its content becomes so famous so quickly. Because WordPress blogs are built on SQL databases, they are very likely to have this problem. However, adding WP Super Cache can almost completely get rid of this risk. The tool makes a static HTML page and a cache of your site's content so that the server doesn't have to work as hard and your site can handle more traffic. If your tech site is brand new, I would install the plugin but not turn it on until I saw an increase in traffic or one of my posts was mentioned on a well-known tech blog like Gizmodo or Engadget.

*All in One SEO - Search Engine Optimization is a key part of getting people to find your tech blog on their own. The most important thing is to make great content, but once you've done that, make sure it targets keywords and has some simple optimization to make it search engine friendly. This is something All in One SEO knows how to do. If you use Thesis, the WordPress theme I use, you won't need this plugin, but I recommend getting it right now for pretty much every other WordPress theme so you can start writing your own meta descriptions.

You can use FTP to directly download and upload each of the above plugins to your blog, but I prefer to use the WordPress Dashboard. If you're wondering why some plugins aren't on my top 10, it's because I don't think they're important for a tech blog. As you can see, I use TechBlogStartup to add features that most websites do with apps or widgets, like the list of recent posts in the sidebar and the list of the top six articles across the top of the website. If your site has ever gone down, you'll know how important this is. By limiting the amount of plugins, tech sites with a lot of traffic can use less SQL memory. Do you think there are any WordPress apps that we should know about on your tech blog? Please add your own list of plugins or links to them in the comments section below so we can check them out.