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.

With the release of WP 2.5 last week my admin design plugin’s were all messed up.  Luckily someone picked up the ball and edited the last version of the Tiger Admin interface I was fond of and made it work with WP 2.5.  The latest release of Fluency addressed some issues with layout and overlapping that were in NextGen Gallery that kept me from using the plugin.  The only extra change I made is changing all the fonts and shrinking the size of the font as I was not very happy with what he chose.  Other than that minor change to the CSS file this plugin is great and makes WP 2.5 a powerful upgrade.  As I do all my publishing from Windows Live Writer, I am not in the admin interface that often but when I am this makes it a much better experience.

As with Google Reader there is a plugin for making Gmail look better and function better as well.  It is called Better Gmail 2.  Today I also found an application called Gmail Redesigned which gives you a nice skin to throw onto Gmail.  I don’t use Gmail a lot as I usually use Yahoo to do my web mailing but one thing Gmail does do is it allows me to spoof the email I am sending from so I can email from my school email account straight from Google.  This is a lot easier then logging into my school email account.  Lifehacker says that they are going to update Better Gmail soon so that it has skins but until then using Stylish and this script Gmail is much prettier now!

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.

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.

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

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…

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

As you can see below each post I have now added the ability to rate the blog you are reading with stars.  It is a simple Wordpress plugin and installs with just one file.