I know, I know, not another post about IE6! I actually typed this up a couple of weeks ago while immersed in my site redesign project. I had recently decided that I would no longer support that terrible browser, and this tangential post just kind of “fell out.” I wasn’t sure whether or not to post it, but I recently decided to purge my draft stash by posting everything for your reading pleasure. Thus, you may see [...] • Read more »
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Blacklist Candidate Series Summary
An ongoing series of articles on the fine art of malicious exploit detection and prevention. Learn about preventing the sneaky mischievous and deceptive practices of some of the worst spammers, scrapers, crackers, and other scumbags on the Internet. • Read more »
Secrets of the Conditional Tag Revealed: How to Gain More Control Over Your WP Templates
More and more these days, we are all finding WordPress being used as a content management system. It shouldn’t be too tough to see why — highly customizable, a community growing in size and knowledge, and a plethora of options in the way of plugins and simple yet highly effective PHP edits. Thanks to these, you have access to an open source script that allows you to show what you want, when you want, where you want, [...] • Read more »
Horizontally Sequenced Display Order for WordPress Posts in Two Columns
Most WordPress-powered blogs display posts in sequential order within a single column. Like this, for example: • Read more »
WordPress Error Fix: Unable to Parse URL
Note: This information is intended primarily for WordPress versions previous to 2.3, but may be applicable in other versions as well. For those of you running an older version of WordPress that is generating errors such as: Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable [...] • Read more »
How to Generate Perfect WordPress Title Tags without a Plugin
Keeping an eye on all things WordPress, I have noticed an ongoing fascination with configuring the ultimate WordPress <title></title> tags. Many bloggers use various plugins to generate differently configured <title></title> tags depending on particular page views. A good example of this is seen in the All in One SEO Pack, which, among many other things, enables users to specify custom titles for several different types of pages. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, some of [...] • Read more »
WordPress Tip: Disable Comments in Old Posts via PHP
Just a quick WordPress snippet for future reference. I recently explained how to disable comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks via SQL. Here’s a good way to do it via PHP: <?php function close_comments( $posts ) { if ( !is_single() ) { return $posts; } if ( time() – strtotime( $posts[0]->post_date_gmt ) > ( 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 ) ) { $posts[0]->comment_status = ‘closed’; $posts[0]->ping_status = ‘closed’; } return $posts; } add_filter( ‘the_posts’, ‘close_comments’ ); ?> [...] • Read more »
Working with Multiple Themes Outside of the WordPress Installation Directory
As you may observe, the WordPress installation that powers Perishable Press is located in a subdirectory named press. This configuration was intentional, as I wanted to have the option to easily install and maintain multiple versions of WordPress in variously named subdirectories. As much as I enjoy this flexibility, many would argue the SEO-related benefits of installing WordPress in your site’s root directory, or at least making it appear that way by using WordPress’ easily customizable “Blog [...] • Read more »
Preventing the Unpredictable White Screen of Death for WordPress Sites with Multiple Themes
For the past several months and up until just recently, Perishable Press had been suffering from unpredictable episodes of the dreaded white screen of death. Although blank white screens happen to virtually all WordPress users now and then, certain configurations seem to trigger crashes more frequently than others. Here, I am referring to WordPress version 2.3. In this case, the unpredictable crashes, inconsistent errors, and general instability began several months ago after I had completed my WordPress [...] • Read more »
Blacklist Candidate Number 2008-05-31
Welcome to the Perishable Press “Blacklist Candidate” series. In this post, we continue our new tradition of exposing, humiliating and banishing spammers, crackers and other worthless scumbags.. Just under the wire! Even so, this month’s official Blacklist-Candidate article may be the last monthly installment of the series. Although additional BC articles may appear in the future, it is unlikely that they will continue as a regular monthly feature. Oh sure, I see the tears streaming down your [...] • Read more »
Blacklist Candidate Number 2008-04-27
Welcome to the Perishable Press “Blacklist Candidate” series. In this post, we continue our new tradition of exposing, humiliating and banishing spammers, crackers and other worthless scumbags.. Since the implementation of my 2G Blacklist, I have enjoyed a significant decrease in the overall number and variety of site attacks. In fact, I had to time-travel back to March 1st just to find a candidate worthy of this month’s blacklist spotlight. I felt like Rod Roddy looking over [...] • Read more »
Drop-Dead Easy Random Images via PHP
Recently, while restoring my collection of Perishable Press themes, I needed a fast, effective way to randomize a series of images. After playing around with several likely candidates, I finally devised the following drop-dead easy technique: <img src=”http://domain.tld/path/random/image_<?php $random = rand(1,n); echo $random; ?/>.png” alt=”[ Random Image ]” height=”50″ width=”50″ /> This single line of code facilitates the random display of n number of images (image_1.png, image_2.png, image_3.png, etc.) located in the target directory (http://domain.tld/path/random/). For those [...] • Read more »
Three Unsolved WordPress Mysteries
After several years of using WordPress, I have at least three unanswered questions: What’s up with the WordPress PHP Memory Error? Why do certain phrases trigger “Forbidden” errors when saving or publishing posts? What happened to the Plugin Pages in the WordPress Codex? Let’s have a look at each one of these baffling mysteries.. • Read more »
Content Negotiation for XHTML Documents via PHP and htaccess
In this article, I discuss the different MIME types available for XHTML and explain a method for serving your documents with the optimal MIME type, depending on the capacity of the user agent. Using either htaccess or PHP for content negotiation, we can serve complete, standards-compliant markup for our document’s header information. This is especially helpful when dealing with Internet Explorer while serving a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1 along with the recommended XML declaration. According to the [...] • Read more »
Custom HTTP Errors via htaccess
We all know how important it is to deliver sensible, helpful 404 error pages to our visitors. There are many ways of achieving this functionality, including the well-known htaccess trick used to locally redirect users to custom error pages: # htaccess custom error pages ErrorDocument 400 /errors/400.html ErrorDocument 401 /errors/401.html ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.html ErrorDocument 404 /errors/404.html ErrorDocument 500 /errors/500.html ..and so on. These directives basically tell Apache to deliver the designated documents for their associated error types. [...] • Read more »
WordPress Tip: Careful with that Autosave, Eugene
After upgrading WordPress from version 2.0.5 to 2.3.3, I did some experimenting with the “post autosave” feature. The autosave feature uses some crafty ajax to automagically save your post every 2 minutes (120 seconds by default). Below the post-editing field, you will notice a line of text that displays the time of the most recent autosave, similar to the following: Surely, this relatively new feature provides an added layer of protection against lost work, but all is [...] • Read more »