If you host your own Wordpress blog, it is important to make sure you have the latest security updates installed and also to make sure you maintain a fairly tidy backend. The reason is simple: performance and data integrity.

For a few plugins that can help with this, check out this article. Outside of the automatic update and backup (very cool), these plugins do not do anything I would consider critical, but they are nice for keeping stuff you have to manually do to a minimum.

Regardless, this is a nice resource for finding a few plugins you might find useful.