Lately I have noticed several sites that display those unsightly dotted outlines on high-profile link elements. Typically, these link outlines plague various header elements such as banner images, navigational links, and other key features. This behavior frequently haunts highly graphical site designs and is often associated with various image replacement methods that position the original anchor text offscreen, generally far beyond the left edge of the browser window. When visible, such presentations display a ghastly, four-sided dotted [...] • Read more »
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WordPress Hack: Multiple Email Recipients for Contact Coldform
In the current version of my custom contact-form WordPress plugin, Contact Coldform, there is no built-in method of sending emails to multiple addresses. The thought of adding such functionality had not occurred to me until recently, when a Coldform user asked about enabling it. After a bit of investigation, it turns out that integrating multiple-recipient functionality into Contact Coldform is as easy as it is practical. I will definitely be adding this feature to the next release [...] • Read more »
Unexplained Crawl Behavior Involving Tagged Query Strings
I need your help! I am losing my mind trying to solve another baffling mystery. For the past three or four months, I have been recording many 404 Errors generated from msnbot, Yahoo-Slurp, and other spider crawls. These errors result from invalid requests for URLs containing query strings such as the following: http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=spam http://perishablepress.com/press/page/3/?tag=code http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=email http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=xhtml http://perishablepress.com/press/page/4/?tag=notes http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=flash http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=links http://perishablepress.com/press/page/3/?tag=theme http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=press ..plus hundreds and hundreds more 1. The URL pattern is always the same: a different page number followed [...] • Read more »
Taking Advantage of the X-Robots Tag
Controlling the spidering, indexing and caching of your (X)HTML-based web pages is possible with meta robots directives such as these: <meta name=”googlebot” content=”index,archive,follow,noodp”> </meta><meta name=”robots” content=”all,index,follow”> </meta><meta name=”msnbot” content=”all,index,follow”></meta> I use these directives here at Perishable Press and they continue to serve me well for controlling how the “big bots” 1 crawl and represent my (X)HTML-based content in search results. For other, non-(X)HTML types of content, however, using meta robots directives to control indexing and caching is not [...] • Read more »
WordPress Tip: Quick Hack to Block Spam for the Wordspew Shoutbox Chat Plugin
Recently, I reactivated an older version (1.16) of Jalenack’s Wordspew Shoutbox plugin for the Dead Letter Art chat forum. The DLa collective (of which I am a member) has been working on a new issue of their ‘zine and needed an easy online chat location for impromptu business dealz (ideas, planning, etc.). Almost immediately after reactivating the Shoutbox plugin, the chat forum was flooded with an endless wave of spam. The rate and volume of spam was [...] • Read more »
Obsessive CSS Code Formatting: Indentation and Spacing
In the intriguing discussion following the first obsessive CSS formatting article, Jordan Gray brought up the age-old question regarding spacing: tabs or single spaces? I smugly responded that the issue has long-since been resolved, with tabbed spacing as the obvious winner. Let’s take a look at some serious CSS spacing examples.. 1) Strictly Single Spacing Here we have several code blocks showing consistent spacing via single blank space. Three key areas where single spacing is seen in [...] • Read more »