I did the final round of plugin re-installs today- most of them are to make my life easier, and will not alter the way you interact with the blog much.
One of them creates a Google Sitemap for the blog. I had something to do this since Google launched the protocol a week or two ago, but this one is easier to use and is configurable (it’s a Wordpress plugin rather than a PHP file that I drop into the site root). It also creates a Gzipped (.gz) sitemap, reducing bandwidth usage even further.
The idea of Sitemaps (it’s another one of those ’20% of time for personal projects’ things I think) is to give Google a better idea of how my site operates- for example, there is no point in Googlebot (as it normally does) crawling the January 2005 archive every time it visits, because the chances are that page hasn’t changed since its last visit. Whereas my homepage, and the more recent archives (categories and this month’s archive) probably will have, so I want it to check them as often as it can. This is beneficial to site owners and Google itself- for the former, it uses less bandwidth (Googlebot is currently 20% of my total bandwidth usage) as Googlebot can crawl sitemapped sites more efficiently, and for the latter, it improves the quality of search results (and also saves Google bandwidth and time on Googlebot crawls).