PayPal Phishing Spam

Posted on January 25, 2012 in Security by Jeff Starr

Just a heads up to anyone else getting the occasional PayPal phishing spam.. Usually it’s pretty easy to spot one of those crafty phishing emails, just hover over any links before clicking to view the real URL in the status bar. You know, the link says something like, “click here to restore your PayPal account,” but you know that’s garbage and could easily prove it by checking the actual link URL, which is usually something completely bonkers, like:

5G Blacklist 2012

Posted on January 11, 2012 in HTAccess, Security by Jeff Starr

[ 5G ] The 5G Blacklist helps reduce the number of malicious URL requests that hit your website. It’s one of many ways to improve the security of your site and protect against evil exploits, bad requests, and other nefarious garbage.

After extensive beta testing, the 5G Blacklist/Firewall is solid and ready to help secure sites hosted on Apache servers. In addition to beta testing for the 5G, this is the 5th major update of my “G”-series blacklists. Here is a quick overview of its evolution:

jQuery Hover Swap Text

Posted on December 12, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr

Things have been busy! I’m working on a new book and site and having a blast. I’ll share more on that later, but for now I just want to get back into posting at Perishable Press. To kick it into gear, here is one of the jQuery snippets I’m using at the new book site.

5G Blacklist for Microsoft IIS

Posted on November 25, 2011 in Security by Jeff Starr

By design the 5G Blacklist works on Apache servers, but thanks to Scott Stawarz, here is a version for Microsoft IIS:

Roll Your Own “What’s My IP Address?” Page

Posted on October 10, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr

My current ISP likes to keeps things spicy by changing my IP address every few months or so. There are a million ways to get this changing IP information, but as an obsessive web developer, I like to roll my own whenever possible. That means using my own resources instead of spending time and energy elsewhere.

So the goal for this project is to create a web page that does one thing very well: display the visitor’s current IP information. In this tutorial, we use PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to roll our own sleek & stylish “What’s my IP” page in 3 easy steps.

WordPress MultiSite Subdomains on MAMP

Posted on September 28, 2011 in HTAccess, WordPress by Jeff Starr

Developing WordPress sites on a local MAMP server provides flexibility, privacy, and security throughout the development process. Setting up a WordPress environment on MAMP is definitely worth the effort, especially if you’re building and testing multiple sites using WordPress’ built-in MultiSite functionality.

The easiest and recommended way of setting up WordPress MultiSite is to use sub-directories. So when you create a new site named “business”, it will be located at http://localhost/business/. Here’s a mini-tutorial on how to use sub-domains for your network sites.

Building the 5G Blacklist

Posted on September 23, 2011 in HTAccess, Security by Jeff Starr

Protecting your website is more important than ever. There are a million ways to do it, and this is one of them. In fact, it’s what I use to protect Perishable Press and other key sites. It’s called the 5G Blacklist, and it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time. The idea is simple enough: analyze bad requests and block them using a firewall/blacklist via .htaccess. Now in its 5th generation, the 5G Blacklist has evolved into a considerably solid method of keeping your site safe and secure. How does it work? I’m glad you asked..