Oh, and the contact form is also downloaded from somewhere, but I don’t think it’s a regular plugin.

It’s actually a server host specific deal.

We use:

AudioPlayer for the embedded MP3s

CG-Archives by year, which we just installed because the archives were so big

Auto-Close Comments to close comments after 21 days to limit spam

Get Recent Comments for the sidebar.

IImage Browser for uploading images — fairly recent addition, did it manually until last week.

Kramer basically makes pingback and trackback more robust by searching inbound links rather than waiting to be notified. They’re noted with the little K icon if they’re found this way.

Live Comment Preview (which is the little Javascript preview under a comment)

LMBBox Comment Quicktags (this adds the quicktags on the comment boxes)

FeedBurner Feed Replacement, since we use FeedBurner for feeds.

Related Posts makes the related posts section above the comments

SearchHistory but we’re phasing it out since I put in the Google Search

Subscribe Me puts the tiles for Yahoo, Bloglines, etc on the sidebar

TextControl, which lets me format a given post based on different markup, so that I can do stuff like paste in code

Top 10 Posts, Views per Post which is the one you want. Kristen hacked this a bit to generate top 100 onto a separate page.

Translator for the machine translation.

User Online to see how many people are on right now, which I check reflexively.

Tiger Style Administration for a nicer admin panel.

WP-Amazon makes it easy for me to add Amazon links into those review posts that burn in my Associates ID.

WordPress Database Backup makes backups easy — I think this is included in WP 2.0 but we haven’t upgraded yet.

Spoiler tags but I never use them because they apparently don’t always work, particularly in feeds.

We hacked in the icon support for posts ourselves (and have a bug in the CSS, which is why they are not visible on IE). There’s plugins for that too, and we’ll probably move to that when we upgrade to 2.0. We also hacked the sidebar itself a lot, and custom built the theme so that it could resize to any window in three columns.

Oh, and the contact form is also downloaded from somewhere, but I don’t think it’s a regular plugin.

In addition to all that, I also have some stuff on FeedBurner (which rocks, btw): We run BrowserFriendly, SmartFeed, Feed Image Burner, Amazon ID Burner, FeedCount (displayed in the sidebar here), PingShot (notifies more aggregators than the default in WP) and Headline Animator, which is in place on the Theory of Fun website.

We also have FeedFlares for Email This, Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg This, Slashdot This, Comments Count, and Subscribe to Comments. These get attached as links automatically in all feed articles, at the bottom.

For stats, we use both Webalizer and awstats. Most of the monthly popularity data here actually comes from awstats and we extract it manually; the popular posts plugin is “all time.”

[...] Inspired by both Raph Koster’s monthly reports and Google’s Zeitgeist, I decided to drop in some information for last month’s common search terms that led people here to Nerfbat. As I think Google’s word, “Zeitgeist,” is awesome, I am shamelessly stealing it for my own use until such a time that I come up with a better word myself. [...]

oblivion female lower body

They were probably looking for my post.

Gah, I should charge for this service! : )

Also- the site layout could use some serious love. I hope Jare gave you some good advice. The sidebars being cluttered isn’t the entire problem, there is a serious lack of “white space” on the site, and it can make everything look too cluttered.

Don’t place the whole blame on just sidebars though, removing the cafepress ads won’t fix it entirely.

Last, less is more only if that’s your object. Presentation is communication, and well, I gotta ask: is what you want to communicate “simplicity”?

Presentation is definitely not communication, but I’ll stop there since I started writing more content for my article.