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. Overall, I extremely pleased with how the site is doing, especially considering my disdain for formal advertising and social marketing nonsense. Fortunately, with virtually zero promotional effort, Perishable Press has grown from a simple hobby site into an actual destination for web design and development information. Sure, in the endless ocean of the Internet, I am but a blip on the screen, however, looking at the statistics for 2007, I am optimistic and even excited about what the future may hold for this site.

2007 Stats

In order to save everyone time, I present the following statistics with minimal commentary. As my readers are well aware, I could spend hours and hours discussing every bleepin’ detail of every bleepin’ aspect of every bleepin’ statistic. See, you know what I’m sayin’. Instead, I will let the stats speak for themselves and then, if necessary, field any questions or concerns that you may have. Alright, enough bull droppinz — let’s get on with it..

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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 of the previous year. So, let’s dig into my personal year-end strategy for cleaning things up and preparing for the new year..

Make complete backups of your work

Frequent backups should be a part of any serious online strategy. At the end of the year, I create a complete backup of everything, including all site files (XHTML, PHP, images, JavaScript, htaccess, etc.), as well as all associated database content. I generally duplicate my entire set of files (for all domains), and then include duplicate database backups in their respective directories. I also take this opportunity to purge my email inbox of any “loose ends” by relocating them to their respective domain’s backup directory. I also do this for any loose files, configuration files, article backups, and anything else that goes with a particular domain. This works great at consolidating and organizing data that may be needed at some point in the future. After I have consolidated everything worth keeping, I delete all other backups for the year and burn a permanent copy for the archives. Thus, as time goes on, I will have accumulated all the best bits of each year into a nice annual library of backup content. I can live with that :)

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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 unwanted advertising around the Internet. This concept works great when advertisements are blocked, but what happens when users are unwittingly denied access to legitimate content?

The Two Adblock Extensions

As many are not aware, there are currently two suspiciously similar Adblock extensions for Firefox. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, Firefox users may install either “Adblock” or “Adblock Plus”, both of which are freely available via the Firefox Add-on pages. For many months now, I have been using Adblock Plus. If I remember correctly, I had replaced Adblock with Adblock Plus several months ago while resolving a conflict with some other extension (I should be keeping a log for such changes!). Since installing Adblock Plus, I have been noticing missing content from a significant number of visited sites. While not having the time (until today) to explore the situation in greater depth, I decided to snap a few screenshots along the way, capturing the Firefox view of any sites that seemed to present with missing content. Here are few of the more popular ones:

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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:

• WP-Cache 2 [WordPress plugin]
• WP Super Cache [WordPress plugin]
• WordPress Object Cache [built-in caching mechanism]

While working with the two plugins, WP Cache 2 and Super Cache, I was pleased to discover crystal-clear instructions on each their respective sites. Having access to installation and usage information greatly facilitated the implementation of each of these caching techniques.

On the other hand, finding information about the default WordPress object cache proved virtually impossible. Finally, after locating some decent information, I was able to confirm my initial suspicions and subsequently decided to post a quick article outlining and describing this very straightforward caching method. Although enabling the WordPress cache turns out to be drop-dead easy, it is always good to be sure that you aren’t forgetting a step or otherwise overlooking some important aspect of the process.

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End of year approaches
and I have had enough
of going absolutely nowhere.
Pushing on
I embrace the coming year
with hope and enthusiasm
and without expectation.

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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, or return a database value. For those of us comfortable with editing PHP and htaccess code, there is no need to bloat WordPress with additional plugins for the sake of a few routine tasks. For each of the “pure code” alternatives presented below, we are able to drop an unnecessary plugin without editing the WordPress core. In fact, all of the plugin replacements presented here affect only theme files, thereby keeping WordPress updates nice and easy. Well, okay, one or two methods require editing your root htaccess file, but we are all okay with that, right?

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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 to implement this effective strategy.

Hide PHP errors from visitors

In our article, , we discuss a technique whereby PHP errors are suppressed via htaccess. This is done by including the following htaccess directives to your domain’s httpd.conf or to your site’s root (or other target directory) htaccess file:

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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):

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In this article, I discuss how to get the most out of your site’s images by optimizing them for both people and search engines..

For many sites, images play an important role in the communication process. If used correctly, images have the power to make your articles come alive with clarity and vibrancy. Some visitors may merely notice the image and continue reading, while others will want to know more about your images and dig deeper. While checking out your images, inquisitive guests will explore any clues available to them: alt tags, title tags, and captions, for example. Likewise, when classifying, categorizing, and ranking your site’s images, search engines such as Google employ complex algorithms that evaluate many different image-related aspects in their calculations. Focusing on the details related to image optimization helps both search engines and live visitors to maximize the usefulness of your images. In this article, I present a healthy collection of image-optimization strategies designed to help you get the most from your images.

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Just when I thought I had finally solved my web-hosting woes by transferring to a virtual private server, I am slapped in the face by the cold realities of server memory limitations. Apparently, WordPress-powered sites are extremely resource-intensive, requiring insane amounts of random access memory (RAM), something which does not concern those of us working from shared hosting accounts.

On a shared server, system resources are shared among the various accounts that reside on a particular server. When one of these sites takes a hit and requires extra bandwidth, it “borrows” it from the total amount of bandwidth available for the other shared sites, leaving them with limited memory and other server resources. This is one of the reasons that shared hosting can suck so badly at times. If you happen to be located on a server that hosts a few resource-intensive or unstable sites, chances are high that your site will not perform as well as it might if its neighbors weren’t such stinking pigs.

With shared servers, it is this sharing of server memory that enables WordPress-powered sites to enjoy their resource-hogging plugins without too many issues. Sure, sharing memory can sometimes be a drain when you are fighting with hundreds of other sites for that extra megabyte of precious memory, but at least your site doesn’t shut down if you happen to exceed the predefined memory limits. This is exactly what happened after I setup Perishable Press on my new virtual private server at WiredTree. To be honest, since this was my first move away from shared hosting, I really had no idea how much memory my site was using. Turns out that just this one site — with its reduced number of plugins and optimized content — was enough to gobble up every drop of the 256 MB of allocated RAM without even blinking. It was like, okay, site now online — oops, not any more — you just exceeded your memory limits and crashed Apache. Again. Ugh.

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I realize that probably everybody already knows this elementary and absolutely dead-simple JavaScript tip, but I was surfing around the other day and encountered a page that made great use of some auto-highlighted textarea content. The idea is simple, include a snippet of JavaScript to enable users to automatically highlight/select upon focus any chunk of text located within a form input or textarea element. I would imagine this trick works with just about any element — buttons, links, you name it. With the following code in place, content within a textarea will be highlighted/selected when the user hovers over or focuses the area. And for input elements, text will be highlighted if present, and, if not, a blinking cursor will appear, ready to serve. Very nice ;)

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..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights..

The tide may be turning for A Small Orange

I am certainly not alone when I say that shopping for a new hosting provider and transferring websites is one of my least favorite aspects of web development. In my experience, switching hosts requires waay too much time and rarely unfolds without significant problems. Nonetheless, when service and/or support turns sour, upgrading to a better host is well worth the effort. In my case, A Small Orange just wasn’t working out.

Everything was going fine for the first several months — excellent service, fantastic support, and consistent, reliable server uptime. However, during the last several months, server uptime frequently dipped below the 98% level, an unacceptable amount of downtime, especially since it generally happened during critical times: peak hours or while I was trying to work on the site. When I finally submitted a support ticket addressing the “unacceptable levels of downtime,” ASO support staff put my mind at ease by moving my site to a “a more stable server.”

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Hello! If you are seeing this page via the default WordPress theme (i.e., blue header, based on Kubrick), welcome to the new server! I recently upgraded my hosting to a virtual private server, and finally reassigned the domain name servers to resolve to the new address. So, if you are here and everything seems to be working, then everything went according to plan and I will be able to complete the transfer on Saturday (Lord willing). If, on the other hand, something is busted, throwing an error, or otherwise causing problems, then Saturday may involve more troubleshooting and fixing things.. Either way, if you are reading this, welcome! There are great things in store here at our new home ;)

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Hello!

As many of you already know, the popular WordPress anti-spam plugin, Bad Behavior, caused some problems yesterday, and as a result many bloggers and users were locked out of their favorite sites, including this one. As for now, the problem seems to be fixed, however, the experience of being locked out of my own site has left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Needless to say, I will be reconsidering the continued use of Bad Behavior as a part of my long-term anti-spam strategy. In the meantime, everything is up and running fine again (with Bad Behavior disabled) — comments are working, and I can even log in to admin to write new posts :)

In other news, Perishable Press is moving to a new server! I just switched the DNS to my new VPS nameservers, so hopefully everything will propagate and transfer without a hitch. Nonetheless, if something does happen to go wrong, Perishable Press may be offline for a spell, but rest assured, I am all over it..

So — here goes nothing — I am pulling the plug on the old server — see you on the other side ;)

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A great to way to share your PHP code with visitors is to display it directly in the browser with automatically generated syntax highlighting. Here is a screenshot showing an example of syntax-highlighted PHP code:

Displaying your PHP scripts in syntax-highlighted form is an excellent way to share source code details directly with your readers. Rather than zipping the script and requiring users to download, unzip, and open the file in an editor, displaying your code directly saves you and your visitors time, effort, and hassle. Plus, in my opinion, looking at syntax-highlighted PHP code is a beautiful sight, day or night ;)

In this article, we will explore 5 different ways to display the syntax-highlighted source of your PHP scripts. Three of the methods are designed to highlight entire files, and the other two are aimed directly at highlighting individual strings of PHP code. All of these methods employ PHP’s built-in syntax highlighter.

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