A picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s unlikely that you want to spend a thousand dollars on every picture you use on your blog. Using your own photos and pictures is best, but sometimes that just not a viable solution.

So, you might want to check out the Clip Art Illustration plugin for WordPress. It integrates directly into the pages and post areas, allowing you to search and insert through the library of clip art images from Clip Art Illustration. These images are all free to use, both for personal and commercial purposes.

As with every other image that you might want to insert in your blog posts and blog pages, the images pulled by this plugin will allow you to choose your alignment. You can enter your own search terms and sift through the paginated results.

Check out the official page for this plugin at ClipArtIllustration.com, where you can download the plugin for free. Alternatively, the official directory has a download link as well.

Want to add some extra personality to your blog? Implementing the WP Display Header WordPress plugin might be an interesting option to consider. It was created by Konstantin Obenland of Germany.

Most blogs have only one header image and this single image appears across all posts and pages. If you have a multi-author blog, however, you might want to have a different header for the posts from each author. Similarly, you might want a different header image for different subject areas.

With this plugin, you have the ability to specify a different header image on each post individually, choosing from your default headers and custom headers. A simple meta box is added to the “post edit” screen. If no custom header is defined, the post will automatically use the default header for your current theme.

As is the norm, you can head over to the WordPress Plugin Directory to download WP Display Header directly. It is currently verified to be compatible with versions up to WordPress 3.1.

A blog is meant to provide all sorts of dynamic content, so it makes sense that there are many WordPress plugins that facilitate the inclusion of dynamic content. One of these is the Flexi Quote Rotator from Stellar Web Works.

Based on the Quote Rotator plugin by Luke Howell, this plugin allows you to automatically add quotations to any WordPress post or page. The key is that the quotes are automatically rotated through a series of lines that you provide to it.

This could be useful for inspirational quotes at the top of a blog, for example, but an even better application would be in the context of a business website. By using this plugin, you can randomly rotate through several customer testimonials, giving a fresh perspective each time a visitor refreshes the page.

Check out sww.co.nz for more information, including installation instructions and a FAQ. Then, proceed to the WordPress Plugin Directory to access the free download link.

There are many reasons why you would opt for a WordPress.org self-hosted installation for your blog or website, but there are also advantages to the hosted WordPress.com solution too. Get the best of both worlds with this plugin.

Jetpack “supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.” This helps to really speed up your site with a number of additional helpful features.

You get WordPress.com stats for free, as well as a Twitter widget, Gravatar hovercards, WP.me shortlinks, Sharedaddy, LaTeX markup language, After the Deadline (spellcheck and grammar check), and shortcode embedding with YouTube, Vimeo and SlideShare.

Jetpack itself is completely free to download and install. In the future, the developers aim to add some “premium” features that will come at a cost.

Go to JetPack.me for more information and to download the WordPress plugin for your own site.

When you look at most of the blogs on the Internet, the blog owners may choose to include a list of links either in the sidebar or in the footer of the site. This blogroll is a great way to grow a community and share relevant sites with your readers.

What if you want to embed that blogroll into a blog post or page? The whole point of a blogroll is that it can be dynamic in nature, changing over time as sites come and go. One way to embed the list is via the Blogroll to Page WordPress plug-in.

As its name implies, the plugin will allow you to output your blogroll links to any page or post on your blog. All you have to do is use the custom “blogroll-to-page” short code where you want it to be displayed. There are output parameters that can be configured to suit your needs too, including categorization.

For more information on how it works, head over to Club-Wp.com, the site of the plugin’s developer. That is also where you can find the free download link.

Sometimes, the most important things are the ones that happen behind the scenes. In addition to the countless plug-ins that adjust your admin panel and change the look of your blog, there are many more than don’t make many visible changes but are ultimately more useful.

One such example is Secure WordPress, a plug-in that helps to protect your WordPress site from hackers and other malicious attacks. This plugin actually serves no fewer than eleven different functions, all of which without any additional input on your part.

Among the processes to help secure your WordPress installation, the plugin will remove the wp-version (except in the admin area), remove Windows Live Writer, remove plugin update information from non-admin accounts, block bad queries, and remove error-information on the login-page.

Coupled with some of other security efforts, Secure WordPress should be able to keep your site reasonably safe from malicious attacks. Download it for free from the WordPress Plugin Directory as usual.