Important Note for Your Custom Error Pages
Just a note to web designers and code-savvy bloggers: make sure your custom error pages are big enough for the ever-amazing <cough> Internet Explorer browser. If your custom error pages are too small, IE will take the liberty of serving its own proprietary web page, replete with corporate linkage and poor grammar. How big, baby? Well, that’s a good question. In order for users of Internet Explorer to enjoy your carefully crafted custom error pages, they need to exceed 512 […] Continue reading »
First 30 Days without Bad Behavior
Approximately 30 days ago, I completely uninstalled the Bad Behavior plugin from Perishable Press. As you may recall, many Bad Behavior users were unexpectedly locked out of their own sites and forced to either uninstall or upgrade in order to fix the problem. Of course, in my perpetual battle to optimize and streamline everything, I decided to drop Bad Behavior from the otherwise obligatory WordPress anti-spam trinity. 30 days later.. I am happy to report that Perishable Press has not […] Continue reading »
Comprehensive URL Canonicalization via htaccess for WordPress-Powered Sites
Permalink URL canonicalization is automated via PHP in WordPress 2.3+, however, for those of us running sites on pre-2.3 versions or preferring to deal with rewrites directly via Apache, comprehensive WordPress URL canonicalization via htaccess may seem impossible. While there are several common methods that are partially effective, there has not yet been available a complete, user-friendly solution designed specifically for WordPress. Until now.. In this article, I share my “secret” htaccess URL canonicalization formula. I originally developed this method […] Continue reading »
A Moment of Clarity
Finally, after seven years of working online.. a moment of clarity. It all seems so clear now: your blog is an extension of yourself, a digital representation of your very being. Online, your site is you, revealing your interests, personality, intelligence, wisdom, and anything else that may be deduced from various levels of inquiry. Whether you realize it or not, your website is more than a well-presented database, it is your virtual self, your virtual existence in the infinite realms […] Continue reading »
Coldskins: Custom CSS Skins for Contact Coldform
With the recent release of my latest WordPress plugin, Contact Coldform, I am also creating a series of free, “drop-in” CSS skins for easy, “plug-n-play” customization. These skins employ valid, optimized CSS code designed for the following browsers: Continue reading »
Advanced PHP Error Handling via htaccess
In my previous article on logging PHP errors, How to Enable PHP Error Logging via htaccess, we observed three fundamental aspects of preventing, preserving, and protecting your site’s PHP errors. Continue reading »
WordPress Plugin: Contact Coldform
Welcome to the homepage for Contact Coldform, a secure, lightweight, flexible contact form with plenty of options and squeaky clean markup. Coldform blocks spam while making it easy for your visitors to contact you from your WordPress-powered website. The comprehensive Settings Page makes it easy to take full control with plenty of options and several built-in themes for styling the form. Coldform delivers everything you need and nothing you don’t — no frills, no gimmicks, just pure contact-form satisfaction. Now […] Continue reading »
Blacklist Candidate Number 2008-01-02
Welcome to the Perishable Press “Blacklist Candidate” series! In this first post, we begin a new tradition of exposing, humiliating and banishing spammers, crackers and other worthless scumbags.. Every Wednesday, I take a little time to investigate my 404 error logs. In addition to spam, crack attacks, and other deliberate mischief, the 404 logs for Perishable Press contain errors due to missing resources, mistyped URLs, and the occasional bizarre or even suspicious behavior of the search-engine robots. Whenever possible, I […] Continue reading »
WordPress Tip: Reduce the Size of the WP-ShortStat Database Table
In this article, I present a simple method for dramatically decreasing the size of your WordPress database by partially emptying old data from the WP-ShortStat table via the following SQL command: DELETE FROM `wp_ss_stats` ORDER BY `id` ASC LIMIT n That is the point of this entire article, which dips into just about everything one might need to know before employing such strategy. If you are familiar with SQL and understand the purpose and functionality of this command, feel free […] Continue reading »
Perishable Press Site Statistics for 2007
One of the year-end maintenance rituals that I have decided to adopt involves sharing a few annual site statistics for Perishable Press. Over the course of the previous year, Perishable Press has gone through many changes, including switching servers multiple times, eliminating nofollow attributes from comments, and even a complete site overhaul and restructuring. Despite the chaos surrounding such events, traffic levels have continued to increase, bounce rates have steadily decreased, and the number of feed subscribers continues to grow. […] Continue reading »
Do You Have a Year-End Maintenance Ritual?
Over the past several years working online, my year-end maintenance routine has evolved from simple website backups to a robust strategy involving many important and useful tasks. Some of the items on the list have indeed been performed multiple times throughout the year, but are included here to emphasize their importance. Additionally, many of these tasks are great for helping bloggers gain a clearer picture of their overall online empire, while attaining a sense of annual “closure” concerning the work […] Continue reading »
Are Adblock-Plus Visitors Seeing Your Content?
As Firefox continues to grow in popularity, it is inevitable that more and more users will install plugins such as Adblock and Adblock Plus. As we know, such extensions work by filtering site contents through a list of predefined wildcard directives and other rules. Users may also customize the block-list by right-clicking on unwanted images or even subscribing to an automated filterset updater. Apparently, a significant number of Firefox users employ these extensions to help control the relentless flood of […] Continue reading »
How to Enable the Default WordPress Object Cache
Recently, while attempting to optimize site performance, I found myself experimenting with various caching mechanisms currently available for WordPress. Specifically, I explored each of the following caching options: Continue reading »
Optimize WordPress: Pure Code Alternatives for 7 Unnecessary Plugins
In this article, my goal is to help you optimize WordPress by replacing a few common plugins with their correspondingly effective code equivalents. As we all know, WordPress can be a very resource-hungry piece of software, especially when running a million extraneous plugins. Often, many common plugins are designed to perform relatively simple tasks, such as redirect a feed, display a random image, query the database, etc. For those of us comfortable with editing PHP and htaccess code, there is […] Continue reading »
How to Enable PHP Error Logging via htaccess
In this brief tutorial, I will show Apache users how to suppress PHP errors from visitors and enable PHP error logging via htaccess. Tracking your site’s PHP errors is an excellent way to manage and troubleshoot unexpected issues related to plugins and themes. Even better, monitoring PHP errors behind the scenes via private log is far better than trying to catch them as they appear at random visits. Thanks to the magical powers of htaccess, there is an easy way […] Continue reading »
Yahoo! Slurp in My Blackhole (Yet Again)
Yup, ‘ol Slurp is at it again, flagrantly disobeying specific robots.txt rules forbidding access to my bad-bot trap, lovingly dubbed the “blackhole.” As many readers know, this is not the first time Yahoo has been caught behaving badly. This time, Yahoo was caught trespassing five different times via three different IPs over the course of four different days. Here is the data recorded in my site’s blackhole log (I know, that sounds terrible): Continue reading »
