I found another WP Admin Theme that I am a big fan of because for some reason Fluency kept causing me a couple of issues as I found a few pages were dead and in all honesty I wasn’t too keen on the color usage.  Baltic Amber Admin Themes and Schemes is the name of the plugin.  I like this plugin because it works directly with WP’s new color scheme options for each user.  After installing the plugin you just go to users then click on your user and then change the theme color.  It also allows you to easily customize to use any color scheme you want so you are not limited in any way.  I haven’t played around with the CSS sheets too much yet but chances are I will change the fonts around and probably the sizes as I usually like to be different

Since I do all my blogging from Windows Live Writer I am not too worried about the Admin interface as I use it more to just manage and maintain my site. But this plugin makes for some nice effects and colors, currently I am using the Asphalt Color scheme.

As you can see I have changed my theme for my blog.  Well unless of course you only read my blog via RSS…yes all 14 of you!  I am really happy with the look of this new theme with some minor changes.  I had to do a couple of CSS tweaks to fix some issues I noticed as well as changing the header logo to my next car, the reason I am in school, the Audi A5.  I also made some tweaks to the templates to allow the Ajax plugin to work correctly and all seems well.  Overall I am very happy with this template and looking around TopWPThemes website they have a ton of very nice easily modifiable layouts, so I am adding them to the list of templates.  I was also very happy to see that my blogroll from Google looks pretty good with the new layout.

I am trying to keep up with my blogging but lately it has been a little rough running into the end of the semester along with spring it is tough to find time to contribute.  I have a lot in my backlog so you can expect an occasional flooding of new information.

I ran across a need for a stand alone IE6 because I have installed IE7 at work but I need to test against IE6 because that is our corporate standard.  The only issues I have found with the stand alone are it doesn’t seem to register cookies correctly and the bookmarks don’t work but as long as you can get to your page for testing this should get the job done.  I just with Microsoft would pick a standard CSS, but because they don’t web pages will render differently on all versions of IE.  It will be nice to see IE8 as it looks like that passes the ACID test so it will render similar to FireFox.

A little while ago I created a macro that does a paste special, paste plain text.  This comes in very handy when copying and pasting and you don’t want to carry over formatting.  After creating the macro I added a shortcut to it as CTRL-SHIFT-V.  So when I want to paste without formatting this saves me a ton of time.  Below is the code you need to put into the macro.

Sub PlaintextPaste()
‘
Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteText, Placement:= _
wdInLine, DisplayAsIcon:=False
End Sub

One of the most useful plugins I have is an automatic updater.  This thing is great because all you do is click one button and it goes out to Wordpress.org and downloads the most up to date file unzips it and installs it.  Before it does that it creates a backup of your files and disables plugins.  After install it restarts all your plugins and makes upgrading as easy as clicking one button.  This is great because it saves me time of downloading the new file unzipping and uploading via FTP.  Just click the Wordpress logo to get the plugin.

Have you ever wanted to check out a feed on Google Reader before subscribing to it?  If you add a bookmark with the following code and click it when an RSS feed is available it will allow you to do just that.  This comes in handy if you are curious if the feed contains images or is just headlines without any text, this has saved me from subscribing to some less useful feeds.

Bookmark Code (copy and paste):

javascript:var%20b=document.body;if(b&&!document.xmlVersion)
{void(z=document.createElement(’script’));
void(z.src=’http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js’);
void(b.appendChild(z));}else
{location=’http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)}

This plugin is one of the best plugin’s I am using for Firefox these days.  This one fixes it so that little screen that pops up after you click an RSS feed link that lets you choose Google reader or iGoogle goes away and defaults to Google Reader.  It also allows you to skin the reader with a few different choices.  I am a fan of the OSX theme (yes I hate Macs but their color schemes are usually the best) this theme is very clean and gives Google Reader a new look.  Also it allows you open the link in the RSS feed right into the browser making it much cleaner and easier to use.

The code is written by our good friends over at Lifehacker, I also like it because I am not a big fan of using Grease Monkey scripts and that used to be the only way to change the look of Google Reader but now this is just a stand alone plugin.  Click the picture to get the plugin.

I had to look around today for a Hex color code to change the default color of a hyperlink on my blog today and ran across this sight and thought it was worth noting.  It makes finding a hex color super easy!

Looks like phpBB3 is finally out of beta today and ready for production.  I have been running this all semester for my classes and had no issues and updated all the way through the development process.  Its super easy to use and has a nice clean interface and easy to manage.  My only qualm is the lack of RSS feeds from the forum but I can survive without that.  I have come across a website that has free Templates for you to use instead of the default one (phpBB3Styles).  With some minor modifications it now more closely resembles my blog template.  Amazing what software you can get for free these days.  This was a super easy repository to use for school and very helpful for keeping all teammates on the same page as to where the project is.  Also provides an easy medium to share documents and keep everyone on the same version.

So now there is no excuse to have an ugly out of date website these days.  So its time to re-do your 1990’s web layout and do something nice with some CSS work and of course rounded corners! You cannot have a website anymore without rounded corners!  This is in addition to a previous post that I have from July of a site that offers free website templates to get you going.  The one I posted in July is the one I used to create my landing page.  It is amazing the free resources that are out there for you to build good looking web sites.