Add Some Style to the Wordpress Admin Panel

As anyone who uses Wordpress knows, the admin panel is a little rough on the eyes. It’s the same blend of blues and greys, it never changes and if you get sick of looking at the ‘fresh’ design that was released with Wordpress 2.5 the only other option you have is the vintage Wordpress look, which is even worse than the fresh look.

If you’re like me, you know that change is good, especially when it comes to sites you look at every day. We all need to change it up a little bit every now and then, which is why sites like MySpace have so many free template sites and the same goes for Blogger and Wordpress design templates, why sites like Plurk and Twitter allow you to change the look of your profile, and so on. People do not want to be forced to look at the same thing over and over again. This also applies to the Wordpress Admin section. I know that I spend countless hours every week working on my websites; the amount of hours I put in on my websites are the equivalent of two full time jobs, not even factoring in the fact that I also work a full time job from home. With a “job” that you spend up to 80 hours a week on, looking at the Wordpress admin panel while you go about your website work can get a little sore on the eyes and very repetitive.

Pressing Pixels thought the same thing and decided to make a plugin to change the look of your Wordpress admin panel–Wordpress Custom Admin Branding.

The Wordpress Custom Admin Branding plugin is a great plugin and makes logging into your Wordpress panel again and again a little more refreshing than it would be normally. Here’s a look at what Woman Tribune’s Wordpress now looks like:

With this plugin, there are three separate parts of the Wordpress admin panel that may be changed with an image of your choice–The login screen, the header and the footer, as you can see to the left here. The plugin works with all Wordpress installations, I’m currently running Wordpress 2.6.1, which you can also see in the footer image, and the plugin works perfectly without any tweaking.

I definitely recommend this plugin for anyone who is sick of looking at the same old Wordpress admin panel. Download the plugin here.

Tackling Comment Spam–For Good

Blogs are everywhere today; just about everyone has one and because so many people of various backgrounds, cultures and personal interests are involved with the caring and keeping of personal or entertainment websites, they have easily become the leading form of web media when it comes to attracting spam.

Web publishers need to constantly be on top of their comments, checking for spam and getting rid of it promptly before viewers see them and suddenly think we condone the buying and selling of illegal pharmaceuticals or we are unnaturally concerned about their personal and intimate relationships. Spam comments are equally bad for everyone involved in a particular website. They are irritating for the webmaster, having to check sometimes daily or even multiple times a day for comments that are inappropriate for the website and are offensive to readers and it also shows readers that a website may not be as professional as it would like to be seen. If a website fails to look the part of a multi-faceted, entertaining and above all, polished and mastered website, it does not matter how well your website does stat-wise, your viewers will not be interested and potential-advertisers will not take you seriously.

Dealing with spam comments can quickly become a second job for a webmaster, especially since the bigger a website gets, the more spam it attracts. The secret is to finding an efficient and user-friendly spam comment program to help eliminate the worry of unprofessional and inappropriate spam. If you are running Wordpress, you are most likely still running the spam monitoring system Akismet that came with your original Wordpress install; however, there are other programs out there, for Wordpress in particular, that I have found to work much better than Akismet.

Defensio is a comment spam monitor and eliminator whose entire mission is based off of outsmarting evil spam, which it does miraculously. In my opinion, you cannot get any better than Defensio for taking the edge off when you’re thinking about how your website is doing and if any spam is leaking through.

With its innovative technology, Defensio actually adapts to the content you post and is proven not to work in the exact same manner for two different bloggers; instead, it adapts to the webmaster’s specific way of managing their comments and follow suite. Every comment that is posted on your website is given a level of “spamminess” and is determined whether or not the level it is given is low enough to be posted. On a personal level, I have seen comments with a spamminess level as low as 20% be held for moderation, just to make sure that it wasn’t someone trying to plug their site or a company looking for some shameless exposure.

With 99.77% accuracy, Defensio definitely gives you the security you need to be a successful, professional and efficient webmaster with absolutely no worry about back doors being left open for spam comments to get away with accessing your content. It tackles comment spam for several different user interfaces such as Wordpress, PixelPost, Mephisto, Text Pattern, Movable Type and Drupal. It is also supported by several different web developer platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Java, Perl, PHP (4 and 5) and Python; all of which can be downloaded here.