So now there is no excuse to have an ugly out of date website these days.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. 

Tired of looking at those ugly Wordpress Admin Pages?  Try this plugin all you have to do is the normal plugin work of downloading, up-zipping, uploading, and activating.  I have made some minor changes to the css files to clean up some stuff and make the text a little easier to read seeing as how some of the text was too small to read I also fixed the alignment of some of the tables so things line up correctly.  Looks like the original project is abandoned as the last time it was updated was December 2006.

PS…This plugin only works with Safari and Firefox if you are using IE you will not see a difference.  I just read the road map for WordPress and it looks like re-designing the admin pages is on the list for the next release in January 2.4

This tool is great for generating some security using .htaccess files and is super easy to use and implement.  It also encrypts the password into a .htpsswd file.

As I am trying to write down all the applications I use on a daily basis I almost forgot the most important one.  I use Notepad++ probably every day and it is great for quick easy changes to just about any type of file.  I use it a lot to make quick changes to php files and stuff like when I don’t want to wait like 10 mins for this awesome dell laptop to boot up Dreamweaver.  It is a great time saver and super light and easy to use.  There is also a PortableApps version that is helpful to carry around on your pen drive.

Thunderbird has a default setting to hide remote images for emails that are not ‘trusted’  Since my email does all my filtering all emails I will download are trusted.  You can go into the configuration editor and change the setting for: mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image to FALSE and that will turn this feature off.  To get to the configuration editor, go to Options -> Advanced -> Config Editor (its a button)

So I Ajaxed Wordpress a little with a plugin cleverly called AJAX’d WP I think that this makes the comments section much smoother and better integrated to add comments.  It was pretty easy to install with some minor changes to the theme that I am using to run those Ajax scripts.  No more jumping to a new page to post comments now it can be done right on the page.  I also added an Ajax Poll to the right side of the blog, not that too many people visit but I figured I would play around with some stuff to see how it works.  Hopefully these new plugins haven’t effected my load time on my blog but I think its all good so far.  Let me know what you think or any suggestions/issues you may have…

With the re-doing of the ARP website I had to deal with email accounts.  Because I went with one of my friends for the hosting he told me he doesn’t host the email anymore but said that Google can.  Well once again Google to the rescue.  I logged into the Goggle Apps website and setup everything and it was very easy.  With some changes to the DNS with the addition of some MX records I now have access to create up to 100 email address up to 4 GB each all with the domain name of my website.  (ie.. dan@danieltmurphy.com) Pretty sweet, also you can setup a subdomain to point to google’s online mail server for easy access.  Plus now Google allows you to get mail via POP3 or IMAP so using a BlackBerry device to get your email is easier than ever.  Amazing what you can get for free these days and how simple it is to setup. 

Alright after installing and validating some good anti-spam plugin’s I have re-opened comments on the blog.  Lets see if this works it was a mess last time I tried this but hopefully this will work a little better.  For anti-spam plugin I am using the one that comes with the basic install…Akismet..so we will see how well that one works.

Well if you haven’t noticed I have installed a very nice gallery plugin for Wordpress.  This is going to replace my Coppermine photo gallery which has worked well until now and I have decided I wanted something more closely related to my blog.  This program is super easy to install just download, unzip and upload to the plugin folder and then activate the plugin.  It also has a widget which you can install which will run in the sidebars and you can have it randomly select images or stick to one image.  I also had to install JW Image Rotation for the slide show option to work correctly

So for those of us who pay for their web hosting this site does really well.  It is not the hosting service that I use (Lunarpages) but is rated number one as my hosting is rated number 2.  Currently this site is hosting websites with a ton of data 500GB of data storage, 5000 GB monthly bandwidth, email, fantastico script library.  Good stuff!