You know that rather boring black and white admin login screen that a standard WordPress installation presents to you on hitting the wp-admin link of your blog?
Well now you can skin and customize the way it looks, exactly like you’ve always wanted to, perfect for corporate customers and the like, all thanks the Ben Gillbanks and his brilliant little WordPress plugin, BM Custom Login.
The plugin itself is pretty simple, just upload and activate kind of thing, but then it is up to you to go that one step further and hit the /wp-content/plugins/bm-custom-login/images/login-bkg-tile.jpg file, this being the image file that is used for the actual login form background.
The plugin comes packaged with a nifty little PSD template which you can open up in Photoshop and manipulate until it looks exactly right, before finally exporting it into a compressed JPG file and replacing the existing login-bkg-tile.jpg file with your own creation.
And that’s pretty much it. It’s not clever by any means, but it does give you that ability to provide a more personal touch on corporate or multi-author blogs and will actually survive core WordPress upgrades as the custom login image is now being stored in a plugins folder, separate from the core WordPress files.
And as you can see below, you can pretty much come up with any design or branding you like!
And just in case you’re wondering what other people are using this plugin for, there’s even a Flickr group dedicated to this very cause in existence! :)
Related Link: http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/projects/bm-custom-login/







Create an Animated GIF from Multiple Images
Picasion is a great online free to use tool, that allows you to instantly generate animated gif files by simply uploading the pictures you want to appear in the resulting animation up to the site. There are a few options you can set to tweak the output (like animation speed and output dimensions for example), but for the most part creating your own animated gif file is as easy as clicking on the upload image button and then pressing the generate key.
In terms of feeding it source images with which to create the animated gif, naturally you can simply upload images directly from your harddrive, though Picasion makes a great little extension on this by also giving you the option to push images directly into it from either your Picasa Web or Flickr accounts.
Outside of the garish littering of adverts all over the site, Picasion really is a nifty little find and will have you spitting out animated gifs faster than what you can blink and quicker than what you would have imagined – all without the help of an expensive graphics software package! :)
Related Link: http://picasion.com/