FYI – In WordPress 3.3 the Admin Bar was renamed the Toolbar, replacing the header entirely, and now has more hooks to edit it. Please read http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/admin-bar-api-changes-in-3-3/ for more information.
Since WordPress 3.1, the Admin Bar has been around and been somewhat controversial. Some people love it, some hate it, and some couldn’t care. A lot of the time in the WP Support Forums I had to remind people that you can turn this off for yourself in your profile.
My standard replies to people was pretty much this:
If it’s throwing your theme out of whack, make sure you have a call to
wp_footer()in your theme’s footer. The next cause for that is your theme’s css having a conflict. If it’s your avatar size, again, that’s CSS. Wanna turn the admin menu ON for EVERYONE? Use the Always Show Admin Bar Function. Like the bar but not the search? Hide Admin Bar Search Plugin is there. Want to minimise it? Admin Bar Minimiser Plugin. Want to disable it selectively? Admin Bar Disabler Plugin can do that.Finally if you MUST turn it off… you can add one of these to your functions.php
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' ); show_admin_bar(false); show_admin_bar(0);OR use the Disable Admin Bar plugin.
FYI, if you put the plugin in a folder called mu-plugins (yes, you can do this on Single Site as well as MultiSite) then your users won’t be able to un-install it unless they go in via FTP. Just put the mu-plugins folder in the same level as themes and plugins (wp-content/mu-plugins) and copy the FILE (not the folder) for the plugin into there. Done.
Now me? I like having it on. I used to have it turned one for all users, all visitors, everyone all the time. Recently, when I re-designed some sites, I removed that functionality because it was showing too much info to people who were suffering from information overload. Once I pulled the admin bar off for non-logged in users, I realized I wanted to change the way it worked.
The normal admin bar is actually pretty straight forward. The pretty icon of your user ID with a drop down menu rocks. The problem I had was my site was built to keep people off the backend. I already use the rocking WP Hide Dashboard plugin, and BuddyPress is installed, so I wanted to redirect people from places like ‘My Profile’ on the unbranded WP backend to the pretty BuddyPress front end. And yes, I think all ‘user interface’ plugins should have a front-end version.
I could have used something like WP Custom Admin Bar, but I knew I was going to want some pretty weird, granular level, control over the layout and the submenus. In order to make this look how I wanted, I had to remove menus I didn’t want (or need) and add in new ones. I did it all in a file called adminbar.php, which I tossed in the mu-plugins folder (so on a multisite it can never be turned off):
function ipstenu_admin_bar_remove() {
global $wp_admin_bar;
/* Remove their stuff */
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('my-blogs');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('my-account-with-avatar');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('appearance');
}
add_action('wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'ipstenu_admin_bar_remove', 0);
The values like my-blogs and so on are the IDs of the menus you want to yank:
my-account-with-avatar/my-account: Links to your account. The ID depends upon if you have avatars enabled or not.my-blogs: My Sites menu. For networks (aka MultiSite) onlyedit: Post/Page edit linknew-content: Add New Content menucomments: Comments linkappearance: Appearance menuupdates: Updates linkget-shortlink: Shortlink to a page
While some of these menus only show up for the admins, I figured I may as well remove the ones I don’t need right there anyway. I’m also of the (unproven) opinion that the fewer calls I make in that admin menu, the faster my site will be. The only reason I yanked my-account-with-avatar was because I wanted to remove some of the submenus and add in my own. I found it was easier to recreate it on my own, so I did this:
function ipstenu_admin_bar_add() {
global $wp_admin_bar, $user_identity;
$user_id = get_current_user_id();
/* Add my stuff */
if ( 0 != $user_id ) {
$avatar = get_avatar( get_current_user_id(), 16 );
$id = ( ! empty( $avatar ) ) ? 'ipstenu-account-with-avatar' : 'ipstenu-account';
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'id' => $id, 'title' => $avatar . $user_identity, 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/members/'. $user_identity .'/profile/' ) );
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( 'Edit My Profile' ), 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/members/'. $user_identity .'/profile/edit/' ) );
if ( current_user_can('manage_options') ) {
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( 'Dashboard' ), 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/wp-admin/' ) );
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( 'Network Admin' ), 'href' => 'https://ipstenu.org/wp-admin/network' ) );
}
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array( 'parent' => $id, 'title' => __( '<strong>Log Out</strong>' ), 'href' => wp_logout_url() ) );
}
}
add_action( 'admin_bar_menu', 'ipstenu_admin_bar_add', 10 );
But wait! If you just tried that, you found out the CSS looks like a monkey puked on your site. The avatar icon’s goobered, that pretty sprite that shows the arrow is missing. Well, that’s easily fixed with some CSS.
In the same adminbar.php file, I put this:
function link_to_stylesheet() {
if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
?>
wp_head you still get the fugly on the admin side. That’s easilly fixed with a second action call: add_action('admin_head', 'link_to_stylesheet');
Now you can make your admin bar have the menus (or submenus) you want to your heart’s content too!
While you can take my work for your starting point, here are the links I found helpful when I was kicking all this around:
• SumTips: Customize WordPress Admin Bar by Adding/Removing Links
• WP Engineer: Add Menus to the Admin Bar of WordPress
• Digging Into WordPress: Admin Bar Tricks
By now, the internet knows about how the 
Using a pen name is something we all accept and can understand. It’s when you delve into the complete fake persona that the world gets a little hinky. ‘Paula’ was a deaf lesbian, who had a girlfriend, kids, and a father who answered the phone and ‘interpreted’ for her (most people think the ‘father’ was actually Graber). At some point, ‘Paula’ killed off her girlfriend. And ‘Amina’? She told in depth details about her parents, how she hid in secret rooms (ala Anne Frank), and how most of her family had to leave the country.
Thankfully, for people like me who spend time worrying about impersonators, you can 
The difference between James Chartrand and someone like 
Mac is going virtual. They’ve finally agreed they’re a hardware company (yay) and they’re trying to make it easier to install software. No longer will you go to the store, but you will logon to the App Store and download. Apparently the App Store is already bigger than Best Buy. The big news of the month was iCloud (and iTunes Match), where you can sync your data across multiple devices. Wirelessly. Okay, that is pretty cool. But the announcements didn’t get everything right.
If I have a Time Capsule, why not let me store all my installers there, register my computers on TC, and then have a local repository of my paid for installs, so I can download them at any time? Think of it as having your own personal little cloud where all your stuff is there, and then when you want to re-install, off you go! Mind you, I already know from experience that if I restore from backup between computers, I can copy over all my apps and preferences. With the new iCloud they’re working on this for iOS apps, which is something they certainly can do. Then you can bring in ….
If someone makes a comment you (or your visitors) deem to be offensive, it’s in your best interest to quickly take decisive action. Make a choice, pick your stance, and stick by it. Don’t waver or feel guilt. This is your site, your responsibility (there’s that word again). If it makes you understand it better, this is your job. The easy part of the site is building it, the hard part is maintaining it. For those of you who just spent months getting your site to look just right, the idea that something is harder than that may be daunting.
I get a lot of requests from people to link to their sites. Back in the day, we all used to have massive link pages where we just listed all the cool sites we knew about. On a fansite, I actually still have one where I list all the related sites, organized by how they’re related, separated by language, etc etc. Here, though, you see a list on the right of links, broken down into “Websites” and “WordPress” and that’s pretty much it.
The Internet is the exact same way. So when you cold-email someone and say ‘Hi, I really like your stuff! Will you link to me site?’ you need to bring your A Game. You need to sell your work, explain to me why you’re worth space on my site, and how come I should read your blog. Just saying ‘I, too, am a blog about vegan dog food!’ doesn’t cut it for the bigger sites. You can’t expect people to spend all their time checking out people they should link to, especially if you’re not already linking to them. Think of it like coming up with a good cover letter for your resume. You want people to read that page and go “Yeah, this cat is cool!”
Back in the day, search engines would rate your site based solely on your self-contained content. One of the ways we would promote our sites would be to use hidden text or meta keywords that only the search engine would see. We’d list all the keywords related to our site about dog biscuits, and awesomely, we’d get rewarded. Naturally some people would shove totally irrelevant keywords in, to game the system for other searches. Which is why sometimes you’d search for ‘free range catnip’ and get a link for ‘wetriffs.com'(Note: 
Of course, there are good backlinks. Like mine to Yoast’s (not that he needs the ‘link juice'(The term ‘link juice’ is what we use to call the ‘value’ of a link coming back to our site. If I link to you, I give you ‘juice’ which boosts your page rank. In Yoast’s case, he doesn’t need any help, but I give it anyway.)). But the best way to get those is to get yourself known in your arena. People don’t link to new sites because they don’t know about them, so you need to get out there and get known. Talk to a site you admire (or people you admire) and ask them if they’ll read and review your site. Post your articles on twitter/facebook/digg/whatever and basically put in the sweat equity to make your site shine. And if that sounded like a lot of work for you, then you’re right. It is work. It’s hard work.
minification and CDN) is a great thing to speed your site up, but at the end of the day, all advice in the world boils down to this: If there’s nothing here for people to read and find beneficial, your site is useless.