Working on the next version of the G-Series Blacklist, I needed a way to match a wide variety of UTF-8-encoded (hex) character strings. Those familiar with their site’s traffic will recognize this particular type of URI request string, which is typically associated with malicious server scanning, exploits, and other malicious behavior. As I explain in this post, pattern-matching and blocking the blank-space, or whitespace character in URL-requests is an effective way to improve the security of your [...] • Read more »
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Case-Insensitive RedirectMatch
Cool trick that you may not have known about.. it’s possible to get case-insensitive matching with the powerful RedirectMatch directive. Normally, you would just write your redirect as something like this: • Read more »
WordPress Add-on for 5G Blacklist
Ill requests and malicious scans have been spiking recently, to the point where server performance was really taking a hit. One scan in particular hammered the server with thousands of bad requests in just a few minutes. There are people out there with strong scripts and small minds that are constantly scanning sites for vulnerabilities, and much of what I’ve seen is aimed primarily at WordPress. • Read more »
Redirect WordPress Date Archives with .htaccess
Restructuring a WordPress website may involve removing the subdomain from URLs/permalinks. For example, I recently removed the original WP-install subdirectory from Perishable Press to simplify site structure and optimize WordPress permalinks. There are PHP scripts and WP plugins that might work for this, but in most cases .htaccess is optimal when changing URL structure and redirecting traffic. Here’s a quick example to help visualize the concept: • Read more »
Category Functions for WordPress
My previous theme sports the now-infamous colorized categories, which aim to help visitors navigate featured content. In addition to the colors, featured categories display contextually relevant navigation, popular posts, and related tags. It’s a great way to improve organization and get more of your content in front of the visitor. To make it happen, a variety of tasty WordPress code snippets are used, including versatile theme functions that enable getting the first category link, displaying sub-categories of [...] • Read more »
WordPress Plugin: GA Google Analytics
Update (2012/11/17): the original “Google Analytics Plugin” has been renamed to “GA Google Analytics” to find a home in the WordPress Plugin Directory. I’ve joked that there a million different Google Analytics WordPress plugins available, but I’ve never been able to find one that’s just dead-simple, plug-n-play, and with clean code and markup, so I wrote my own that does just that: a no-frills way to add the new asynchronous tracking code to all pages on your [...] • Read more »
Dynamic Go-to-Top Link
Instead of displaying a perpetual “go to top” link for every page, here’s a quick way to dynamically display the link only if the content height is greater than that of the browser window. So it’s there when you need it, not when you don’t. Just include the following snippet of jQuery with your design: • Read more »
New Theme!
Yep, just when you thought I was moving on with my life, I spend another month on a new theme. My problem is that I tend to listen to criticism. And my previous theme received plenty of it. People just thought it was too much, too sloppy, too busy, too colorful, too ugly, too lame, and you get the idea. For the record, I think the Unicorner theme is fun and awesome, looking great and visually appealing [...] • Read more »