Personally, I prefer to display my blog categories without in drop down box, but if you really have many categories on your blog, perhaps you can display categories in drop-down box so that your blog will looks more neat.

Below is the simple code to display categories:-

<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
</ul>

To display categories in drop-down box, use the following code.

<form action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/" method="get">
<?php
$select = wp_dropdown_categories('show_option_none=Select category&show_count=1&orderby=name&echo=0');
$select = preg_replace("#<select([^>]*)>#", "<select$1 onchange='return this.form.submit()'>", $select); echo $select; ?>
<noscript><input type="submit" value="View" /></noscript>
</form>

The default wordpress themes are came with avatar support. In case you have use some other free or premium wordpress themes with no avatar support, then you can adding the following simple and short coding to your comment.

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '80'); ?>

get_the_author_email outputs the post author’s email and the “80” is the size of the avatar image in pixels, you can change the size of the avatar according to your needs. Is it looks simple? @@

I don’t know why some people like to display post words count on their blog, but I personally don’t like this function. In case you are the ones like this function, then you can copy and paste the following coding to functions.php.

function wcount(){
ob_start();
the_content();
$content = ob_get_clean();
return sizeof(explode(" ", $content));
}

And then you can call the function to get the number of words of the current post:

<?php echo wcount(); ?>

Thanks to Digging Into WordPress for this excellent code.