Perishable Press

WordPress, Web Design, Code & Tutorials

Add Google+ Share Button to Any Site

g+ Share button Word on the streets is that the new Google+ Share button is the best way yet to benefit from Google’s myriad social-media services and all-important search-engine. And Google makes it SO easy to add the new Share button to your website. This article explains what it is, where it fits in with all the other social-Google stuff, and of course how to add the g+ Share button to any site. • Read more »

Huge Collection of Code Snippets: HTAccess, PHP, WordPress, jQuery, HTML, CSS

Please excuse this self-serving, miscellaneous post, but I’ve just got to purge all of these code snippets and scraps collected over the years. Whenever I update this site, I place any removed/unused code snippets into a giant note file for future reference, just in case. There’s all sorts of different types of code and snippets that just keep growing and growing and.. and finally it gets to a point where I just need to dump everything and [...] • Read more »

Ajax-Powered Error Logs

As an obsessive website administrator, I like to keep a keen eye on my error logs. Once a week, I download my PHP, 404, and other error logs, and analyze them as closely as time allows. Monitoring site errors and other traffic patterns leads to many of the security-related articles I post here at Perishable Press, including resources such as the 5G Blacklist, Ultimate HTAccess Blacklist, and the Blacklist Candidate Series. Easily, one of the best ways [...] • Read more »

Best Method for Email Obfuscation?

Awhile ago, Silvan Mühlemann conducted a 1.5 year experiment whereby different approaches to email obfuscation were tested for effectiveness. Nine different methods were implemented, with each test account receiving anywhere from 1800 to zero spam emails. Here is an excerpt from the article: When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test to [...] • Read more »

3 Ways to Track Web Pages with Google Analytics

Many bloggers, designers, and developers take advantage of Google’s free Analytics service to track and monitor their site’s statistics. Along with a Google account, all that’s needed to use Google Analytics is the addition of a small slice of JavaScript into your web pages. For a long time, there was only one way of doing this, and then in 2007 Google improved their GATC code and established a new way for including it in your web pages. [...] • Read more »

3 Ways to Preload Images with CSS, JavaScript, or Ajax

Preloading images is a great way to improve the user experience. When images are preloaded in the browser, the visitor can surf around your site and enjoy extremely faster loading times. This is especially beneficial for photo galleries and other image-heavy sites where you want to deliver the goods as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Preloading images definitely helps users without broadband enjoy a better experience when viewing your content. In this article, we’ll explore three different [...] • Read more »

Really Simple Browser Detection with jQuery

For my Serious redesign, I push the envelope in terms of CSS’ advanced selector functionality. Stuff like: p:first-child p:first-child:first-letter p:first-child:after p:first-child:first-line Plus lots of other stylistic tricks that require CSS3 support in order to display as intended. Fortunately, most of the browsers to which I am catering with this new design have no problems with most of the advanced stuff. Of course, Internet Explorer chokes on just about everything, but fortunately IE’s proprietary conditional comments make it [...] • Read more »

Perfect Pre Tags

If you operate a website that features lots of code examples, you know how important it is to spend some quality time styling the <pre></pre> element. When left unstyled, wild <pre></pre> tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the <pre></pre> tag quite differently, varying greatly in their default handling of font-sizing, scrollbar-rendering, and word-wrapping. Indeed, getting your preformatted code to look consistent, usable, and stylish across browsers is no easy [...] • Read more »

Dynamic Link Insertion via Unobtrusive External JavaScript

In my recent guest post at The Nexus, I discuss Google’s new nofollow policy (404 link removed 2013/02/08) and suggest several ways to deal with it. In that article, I explain how Google allegedly has changed the way it deals with nofollow links. Instead of transferring leftover nofollow juice to remaining dofollow links as they always have, Google now pours all that wonderful nofollow juice right down the drain. This shift in policy comes as a terrible [...] • Read more »

9 Ways to Set Dynamic Body IDs via PHP and WordPress

When designing sites, it is often useful to identify different pages by adding an ID attribute to the <body></body> element. Commonly, the name of the page is used as the attribute value, for example: <body id=”about”></body> In this case, “about” would be the body ID for the “About” page, which would be named something like “about.php”. Likewise, other pages would have unique IDs as well, for example: <body id=”archive”> </body><body id=”contact”> </body><body id=”subscribe”> </body><body id=”portfolio”></body> ..again, with [...] • Read more »

Unobtrusive JavaScript for ‘Print-This’ Links

One of the oldest JavaScript tricks in the book involves providing a “print this!” link for visitors that enables them to summon their operating system’s default print dialogue box to facilitate quick and easy printing of whatever page they happen to be viewing. With the old way of pulling this little stunt, we write this in the markup comprising the target “print this!” link in question: <a href=”javascript:window.print()”>Print This!</a> Big yuck there, of course, due to the [...] • Read more »

PHP and JavaScript Fallbacks for Your Public Feedburner Count

With the recent Feedburner service outage, many sites across the Web experienced severe drops in their Feedburner subscriber counts. Apparently, Google is requiring all Feedburner accounts to be transferred over to Google by the end of February. In the midst of this mass migration, chaotic subscriber data has been reported to include everything from dramatic count drops and fluctuating reach statistics to zero-count values and dreaded “N/A” subscriber-count errors. Obviously, displaying erroneous subscriber-count data on your site [...] • Read more »

Targeting External Links Intelligently

In the beginning… In the time of the dinosaurs, HTML authors controlled the way anchors opened by adding target=”_blank” as an attribute on an anchor tag. Then the molten mass of Internet began to cool into the thin crust of Web 2.0, the continents began to separate and there came a great migration of pages from HTML to the shinier, new XHTML. Most authors didn’t know what that meant, but it had an “X” in it, so [...] • Read more »

New and Improved JavaScript Clock

Earlier this year, I posted an article explaining how to implement an unobtrusive JavaScript dynamic clock. While not completely earth-shattering or cutting-edge or anything like that, the dynamic JavaScript clock has received some great feedback from users who found the script to be exactly what they were looking for. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, Bill Brown went above and beyond by taking the time to improve the script with some great new features, including a [...] • Read more »