Authenticate is a free WordPress plugin that enables universal and/or targeted inclusion of custom content for both feeds and posts. Ideal for adding copyright information, distribution policy, thank-you messages, custom links, special offers, and much more. Custom content may be added to any location within posts or feeds — before, after, or even within post content. This highly flexible content-addition plugin works great on all 2+ versions of WordPress (i.e., 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5+).

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This is great. A couple of weeks ago I twittered that I had canceled my LinkedIn account. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that my original account signup information was no longer valid and the LinkedIn support staff was unable to even locate my account, let alone reset my password or provide login access. I know the account was there, but no matter what I tried I could not login. So, without being able to update my information, my only choice was to delete the account and start over ¹.

The following week, I was finally able to setup my new account. Everything went very well, and I managed to send out LinkedIn networking invitations to quite a few people on either my Monzilla Media or Perishable Press email/contact lists ². After a successful round of building up my network, I signed off for the week and returned to my regular “offline” job as a Lab Tech.

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Monitoring your computer’s Internet activity is a powerful tool, enabling you to:

• keep an eye on background processes
• reveal viruses and other malware
• expose unauthorized access
• monitor running programs
• log process activity

..and much more. The best part? It’s super-easy. Here’s how I do it on Windows XP:

1. Open the command prompt and type “netstat -n 5 > scan.txt”
2. After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press Ctrl+C to stop monitoring
3. Type “scan.txt” to open the log file and check the results

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Great news! Contact Coldform is now available in Spanish (Spain). Special thanks to Fernando Tellado of Ayuda Wordpress for his superb Spanish translation of the Coldform. Fernando has articulately translated both the administration panel and all of the (X)HTML/text output as well. Contact Coldform is now the perfect solution for Spanish users of WordPress who desire a super-clean, standards-based contact form. Thanks Fernando! :)

For more information, check out Fernando’s post, Plugin Contact Coldform en Español. There you may obtain more information and also download the Spanish (Spain) version of Contact Coldform. You may also download the Spanish version via the Coldform home page. Also, check out Ayuda Wordpress’ post comparing Contact Coldform to Cforms II.

I use the CSS clearfix hack on nearly all of my sites. The clearfix hack — also known as the “Easy Clearing Hack” — is used to clear floated divisions (divs) without using structural markup. It is very effective in resolving layout issues and browser inconsistencies without the need to mix structure with presentation. There are countless variations of the clearfix hack around the Web, and for some sad reason, I keep a file updated with all of them. Recent pruning of my clearfix collection yields two excellent float-clearing techniques:

First clearfix method: addresses several reported rendering and display bugs by declaring very small values for both font-size and height, while also declaring a zero line-height value. A little paranoid perhaps, but the unique declarations seem to have no unintended/negative side-effects. This method also targets IE exclusively for the inline-block declaration. Check it out:

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Before Summer arrives, I need to post the conclusion to my seasonal article, Perishable Press HTAccess Spring Cleaning, Part 1. As explained in the first post, I recently spent some time to consolidate and optimize the Perishable Press site-root and blog-root HTAccess files. Since the makeover, I have enjoyed better performance, fewer errors, and cleaner code. In this article, I share some of the changes made to the blog-root HTAccess file and provide a brief explanation as to their intended purpose. Granted, most of the blog-root directives affected by the renovation involve redirecting broken/missing URLs, but there are some other gems mixed in as well. In sharing these deprecated excerpts, I hope to inspire others to improve their own HTAccess and/or configuration files. What an excellent way to wrap up this delightful Spring season! :)

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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 theme restoration project. Prior to that, I had removed all of my alternate themes and placed them on a subdomain. Meanwhile, after the themes had been removed, I decided to enable the default WordPress cache (don’t ask why). For the next month or so, before restoring my themes, my site performed exquisitely: uptime at 99% (on a shared server, no less), virtually no errors, and so on. Then, after restoring alternate theme functionality, the site began locking up and crashing multiple times each day. Here is a summary of the sequence of events (estimated time frames):

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Consider the Google home page — arguably the most popular, highly visited web page in the entire world. Such a simple page, right? You would think that such a simple design would fully embrace Web Standards. I mean, think about it for a moment.. How would you or I throw down a few lists, a search field, and a logo image? Something like this, maybe:

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Responding to my first attempt at preloading images without JavaScript, CSS-Guru David Bowman graces his audience with a most enlightening triage of comments.

Apparently, the image-preloading technique explained in the article is “major overkill” and “totally ridiculous.” Of course, I will be the first to admit that I am no expert in CSS, but I do enjoy sharing my discoveries and watching as people improve upon them. My first attempt at preloading images without JavaScript may indeed be “pretty crappy,” but it certainly works.

Fortunately, several weeks prior to Mr. Bowman’s dazzling performance, insightful reader Duarte helps the community by sharing a far more elegant solution using display: none;. Here is an example of its implementation:

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This may surprise you, but I post quite a bit of content that never appears in the site’s main feed. It is my impression that a vast majority of subscribers are interested in web/graphic-design and development-related topics, and are really much less interested (if at all) in the miscellaneous odds and ends that wind up in the ever-expanding Perishable Press database.

In the past, the process of excluding content from the main feed typically involved changing the post-date to something at least a year or so in the past. The thinking was that I could always return to these posts at some point in the future and put them back into sequential order. Although effective, this process quickly became far too tedious and time-consuming to prove practical. Keeping my eyes open for possible solutions, I have accumulated several excellent techniques for excluding content from WordPress feeds.

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NOTE: This entire article amounts to nothing more than an in-depth learning experience. After writing the article, I realized (painfully) that either format for the second iteration of the downlevel-revealed comment for XHTML is perfectly fine and displays no ill effects or unwanted characters in any browser. Thus, this article is essentially useless, but I am posting it anyway because I just hate deleting several hours of hard work..

As more and more people discover the flexibility, specificity, and all-around usefulness of Microsoft’s proprietary downlevel conditional comments, it behooves us to reiterate the importance of utilizing proper syntax. Specifically, for downlevel-revealed, or negative, conditional comments, the commented content will remain visible unless the associated if condition proves false. For example, if we were using XHTML and wanted to hide a specific CSS file from Internet Explorer 6, we could employ the following conditional comment to do the job:

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NOTE: This post was written many months ago under the erroneous assumption that caching Mint’s JavaScript was a good idea (for Y-Slow compliance, performance, et al); however, after a brief chat with the man himself, Shaun Inman, I was quickly informed that this was a bad idea: caching Mint JavaScript files will cause Mint to stop functioning. But, for what it’s worth, and for the sake of retaining potentially useful information, I present the original article here for your amusement.. </note>

Recently, I spent some time addressing a few of the performance issues pointed out by Yahoo!’s very useful YSlow extension for Firebug. Working on performance tip #3, Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header, I encountered some difficulty while trying to get the JavaScript used by Mint to cache as desired. Apparently, the HTAccess directives used to cache my other scripts do not effect the two PHP-generated JavaScript files used by Mint. Although I am not entirely certain, I suspect that these files are not being cached along with other scripts because the way in which they are called via query string parameter (Apache is far from perfect when it comes to dealing with anything associated with query strings). In any case, I really wanted to have these Mint scripts cached by the browser, so I ended up editing two files in the Mint core to make it work. For those of you struggling with the same dilemma, here’s how I did it..

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This unfeatured post provides information for (re)establishing wireless Internet access from AT&T/Cingular Data Service (via WAP or MEdia Net) for the HTC/AT&T 8525 mobile device. Or something. This information is useful if you are unable to connect to the Internet and receiving error messages similar to the following:

Error: Your Internet connection is not configured properly. Please verify your settings in Data Connections.

Note: Use of the following settings enables the AT&T 8525 to access MEdia Net (WAP) pages using the MEdia Net connection profile. Additional features such as Wi-Fi and device based e-mail along with other 3rd party applications may not be compatible with the proxy settings associated with the MEdia Net profile. If there are connection issues with e-mail and/or Wi-Fi, configure and use the My ISP profile to resolve connectivity issues. Please note that, configuring the AT&T 8525 to use My ISP will disable MEdia Net (WAP) web pages when My ISP is used for connectivity. However, regular Internet (HTML) web page browsing will function as normal.

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Testing new Stealth-Post plugin.. this post should not appear on the front page or in feeds..

Lately I have noticed several sites that display those unsightly dotted outlines on high-profile link elements. Typically, these link outlines plague various header elements such as banner images, navigational links, and other key features. This behavior frequently haunts highly graphical site designs and is often associated with various image replacement methods that position the original anchor text offscreen, generally far beyond the left edge of the browser window. When visible, such presentations display a ghastly, four-sided dotted border that wraps the linked element and then continues to stretch to the left-hand side of the browser window. Here are a few examples of live websites demonstrating this distracting behavior ¹ (btw, no offense meant to any of these sites — they are all great — they just happen to provide good examples!):

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