Perishable Press

WordPress, Web Design, Code & Tutorials

2007 yearly archive

5 Easy Ways to Display Syntax Highlighted PHP Code

A great to way to share your PHP code with visitors is to display it directly in the browser with automatically generated syntax highlighting. Here is a screenshot showing an example of syntax-highlighted PHP code: Displaying your PHP scripts in syntax-highlighted form is an excellent way to share source code details directly with your readers. Rather than zipping the script and requiring users to download, unzip, and open the file in an editor, displaying your code directly [...] • Read more »

WordPress Core Hacks Used at Perishable Press

One of the necessary evils associated with creating a highly customized WordPress-powered site involves the inevitable necessity to hack the WordPress core. WordPress is built for mass-consumption and tends to cater to the largest audience possible, making it necessary to bend and poke around the corners to get WordPress to function in a more specific or specialized capacity. Of course, there is a major downside to tweaking core WordPress files: upgrading. The overambitious WordPress peeps are constantly [...] • Read more »

Perishable Press Now Featured on Planet WordPress

Today I am happy to announce that Perishable Press has been deemed worthy of citizenship on Planet WordPress! Planet WordPress is an incredible WordPress resource, bringing together some of the Web’s finest WordPress contributors, plugin developers, and theme designers. The Planet WordPress feed currently features nearly 50 hand-selected WordPress bloggers and aggregates their syndicated content every two hours. As proclaimed at the site, Planet WordPress is “The Epicenter of Everything WordPress” — definitely a great way to [...] • Read more »

Protect Your Site Against UserCash and Other Scumbags

In this brief article I explain the atrocity that is UserCash and then provide the JavaScript needed to protect your site. What is UserCash? UserCash is an online advertising program that uses redirects and frames to exploit your site with advertisements. UserCash customers link to target sites using rewritten URL’s generated via the UserCash “generator/compiler.” There are two types of these rewritten UserCash links: Links that use frames to create banner-like ads above your pages Links that [...] • Read more »

How to Add Meta Noindex to Your Feeds

Want to make sure that your feeds are not indexed by Google and other compliant search engines? Add the following code to the channel element of your XML-based (RSS, etc.) feeds: <xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” name=”robots” content=”noindex” /> Here is an example of how I use this tag for Perishable Press feeds (vertical spacing added for emphasis): • Read more »

Three Ways to Allow Hotlinking in Specific Directories

After implementing any of the hotlink-prevention techniques described in our previous article, you may find it necessary to disable hotlink-protection for a specific directory. By default, htaccess rules apply to the directory in which it is located, as well as all subdirectories contained therein. There are (at least) three ways to enable selective hotlinking: Place hotlink images in an alternate directory This method works great if your hotlink-protection rules are located in a directory other than the [...] • Read more »

RefreshMints: Refresh Stats Bookmarklets for Mint 2

Last week, I finally got around to upgrading to Mint 2.14. The new version is quite impressive, and well worth the time (and cash) spent upgrading. In the process, however, one of my favorite, most heavily used bookmarklet things ceased to work. Before the upgrade, I had been enjoying the highly useful Refresh-All bookmarklet by Jonathan Snook. Snook’s Mint-refresh bookmarklet made it super-easy to update all Mint data panels without having to refresh the entire page. Using [...] • Read more »

Stupid htaccess Trick: Enable File or Directory Access to Your Password-Protected Site

In this brief tutorial, we are going to enable users to access any file or directory of a site that is password-protected via htaccess. There are many reasons for wanting to employ this technique, including: Share public resources from an otherwise private site Enable visitors to access content during site maintenance Testing and formatting of layout and design during development As a webmaster, I have used this technique on several occasions. This trick works great for allowing [...] • Read more »

Yahoo! in my Blackhole

Okay, I realize that the title sounds a bit odd, but nowhere near as odd as my recent discovery of Slurp ignoring explicit robots.txt rules and digging around in my highly specialized bot trap, which I have lovingly dubbed “the blackhole”. What is up with that, Yahoo!? — does your Slurp spider obey robots.txt directives or not? I have never seen Google crawling around that side of town, neither has MSN nor even Ask ventured into the [...] • Read more »

Creating the Ultimate htaccess Anti-Hotlinking Strategy

When I wrote my article, Stupid htaccess Tricks, a couple of years ago, hotlink-protection via htaccess was becoming very popular. Many webmasters and bloggers were getting tired of wasting bandwidth on hotlinked resources, and therefore turned to the power of htaccess to protect their content. At that time, there were only a couple of different hotlink-protection methods available on the internet, and the functional difference between them was virtually insignificant. All that was necessary for up-and-coming bloggers-slash-site-administrators [...] • Read more »

Open External Links as Blank Targets via Unobtrusive JavaScript

Beginning with this article, I am serving up a short series of unobtrusive JavaScript functions that I use to enhance the functionality of Perishable Press. In this post, I present a comprehensive JavaScript method of opening external links in new windows (or tabs, depending on the browser). One way of opening links in new windows is to insert the HTML target=”_blank” attribute into all necessary anchor elements (<a href=”"></a>). This method works well, but generates validation errors [...] • Read more »

How to Fix the Wonky Windows XP Clock

I don’t know about you, but ever since the 2007 change in daylight savings time, my installation of Windows XP has had a difficult time (so to speak) maintaining consistently accurate time. Ever since the change, Windows XP has been randomly resetting its clock (as indicated via the Taskbar) to display time incorrectly. Specifically, WinXP will automatically (i.e., without user intervention) set the time to be one hour earlier than the actual time. For example, if the [...] • Read more »