Nearly six weeks after releasing the electronic version of Digging into WordPress, Chris and I are proud to announce that the printed version is now available.

Beautiful custom design with full-color printing on every page

Beautiful custom design..

Make no mistake, this is a beautiful, custom-designed book that makes it fun and easy to soak in the wisdom and advance your WordPress skills. Every detail has been carefully crafted — from the landscape page-orientation and color-coded chapters to the lay-flat spiral binding and large, easy-to-read text — this book is truly a pleasure to experience.

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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 preloading techniques to enhance the performance and usability of your site.

Method 1: Preloading with CSS and JavaScript

There are many ways to preload images, including methods that rely on CSS, JavaScript, and various combinations thereof. As one of my favorite topics here at Perishable Press, I have covered image preloading numerous times:

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A few months ago, many WordPress sites were attacked with some extremely malicious code. While searching for a good solution, I discovered the following gem of a plugin in the pastebin repository:

<?php /* Plugin Name: Block Bad Queries */

if (strlen($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) > 255 || 
	strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "eval(") || 
	strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "base64")) {
		@header("HTTP/1.1 414 Request-URI Too Long");
		@header("Status: 414 Request-URI Too Long");
		@header("Connection: Close");
		@exit;
} ?>

This script checks for excessively long request strings (i.e., greater than 255 characters), as well as the presence of either “eval(” or “base64” in the request URI. These sorts of nefarious requests were implicated in the September 2009 WordPress attacks.

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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 easy to fix things up with some “special” styles:

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Say goodbye to the age-old clearfix hack and hello to the new and improved clearfix method..

The clearfix hack, or “easy-clearing” hack, is a useful method of clearing floats. I have written about the original method and even suggested a few improvements. The original clearfix hack works great, but the browsers that it targets are either obsolete or well on their way. Specifically, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is now history, so there is no reason to bother with it when using the clearfix method of clearing floats.

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One of the most popular articles here at Perishable Press is my January 2005 post, Stupid htaccess Tricks. In that article, I bring together an extensive collection of awesome copy-&-paste HTAccess code snippets. Four years later, people continue to tell me how much they enjoy and use the content as a bookmarked reference for many of their HTAccess needs. The article was even published in a book on Joomla! Security.

This is very inspiring to me, so I have decided to create a similar post for all of the useful WordPress code snippets, tips and tricks that I have collected while working on Digging into WordPress, the new book by co-author Chris Coyier and myself that really “digs in” to all of the awesome ways to get the most out of WordPress. While writing the DiW book, I collected hundreds of incredibly useful WordPress tips and tricks. After packing the book with as many of these techniques as possible, I decided to share the “best of the rest” here at Perishable Press.

If you are one of the millions of people who use WordPress, this article will help you improve the appearance, functionality, and performance of your WordPress-powered websites. Each of these “stupid WordPress tricks” is presented as clearly and succinctly as possible, including as many notes, instructions, and pointers as needed for successful implementation. Of course, keep in mind that we are only scratching the surface here. For a much more complete resource that is packed with tons of tasty techniques, you need to get Digging into WordPress.

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New design in effect at Perishable Press. It’s sort of a hybrid between some of the things I like about the Quintessential theme and some of the best parts of the subsequent Requiem theme. So this new theme is named Serious because it represents a renewed commitment to design, blogging, and everything I love about working on the Web. While I have everything fresh in my mind, here are some of the highlights of the latest incarnation of Perishable Press..

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After nearly a year of production, Chris Coyier and I are stoked to announce our new book: Digging into WordPress! It’s nine jam-packed chapters (400 pages!) stuffed with everything you need to take your WordPress skills to the next level and really get the most out of WordPress. We take you through everything — from setting up for success and creating the perfect theme to optimizing performance and tightening security, Digging into WordPress delivers the goods. You’ll learn how to harness the full potential of WordPress with all of the tips, tricks, and code you need to make it happen.

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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> element. When left unstyled, wild <pre> tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the <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 task, but it certainly can be done. In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to create perfect <pre> tags.

First thangs first

Before getting into it, let’s take a moment to ensure we’re all on the same page. The (X)HTML <pre> element is used to display preformatted text, code, or just about anything else. pre tags are ideal for multiple lines of code or text that need to retain character spacing, display unformatted characters, keep inherent line breaks, and so on.

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I have been wanting to write about 404 error pages for quite awhile now. They have always been very important to me, with customized error pages playing a integral part of every well-rounded web-design strategy. Rather than try to re-invent the wheel with this, I think I will just go through and discuss some thoughts about 404 error pages, share some useful code snippets, and highlight some suggested resources along the way. In a sense, this post is nothing more than a giant “brain-dump” of all things 404 for future reference. Hopefully you will find it useful in pimping your own 404.

When requested page is not found by server, error message is returned; this is the essence of the 404 — Ancient Chinese proverb

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Happy Halloween!

This year, I thought it would be fun to dress up my site with one of its very first themes. The Lithium theme remains one of my favorites, despite some of the scary code used in a few of the template files. Even so, despite its relative simplicty, this theme features some great little details, and even features some stylish quicktags in the comments area. Incidentally, the Perishable Press logo was designed specifically for the Lithium theme way back in 2006.

So enjoy this blast from the past! Hopefully it doesn’t scare anyone too badly..

Note: Thanks to Chris Coyier for the spooky Halloween-theme idea :)

Another note: To use a different theme, check out the theme library.

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Time flies! Perishable Press celebrates its fourth year online during this Fall season. Not really sure what that means at this point, other than a lot of hard work, plenty of great conversation, and a ton of design-related content. How did I get here? Let’s take a brisk stroll down memory lane..

During the site’s first year, I remember being too excited for my own good. WordPress was relatively new and I was completely inspired by the amazing things I could do with it. I spent most of my time building all sorts of different themes, studying web design, and posting useful code snippets. During this first year, Perishable Press was virtually unknown. Late night hours were spent drenched in CSS, (X)HTML, and PHP.

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Might as well face it, Twitter is here to stay. Not that it’s all that bad, just used to be a lot more laid-back and enjoyable. These days it seems to have been taken over by the lowest common-denominator, mostly high-school twits or useless commercial propaganda. Even so, I still enjoy tweeting the occasional profound thought once in awhile, and even like to play around with various types of “advanced” Twitter functionality. You know, cool stuff like including “Tweet This!” links with short URLs, showing off my number of Twitter followers, displaying the number of tweets for each post, and even backing up my marvelous tweets quickly and easily. As you might have guessed, these are the kind of stupid Twitter tricks that you will find in this article. So kick back, relax, and enjoy these twitterific techniques that will make you go tweet.

“Tweet This!” short links for posts

I like to include an easy way for readers to “tweet” my posts, but the URLs are generally way over Twitter’s 140-character limit. Fortunately, we can use PHP’s handy file_get_contents function to grab short versions of our URLs from a free minifying service like TinyURL.

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Running a private site is all about preventing unwanted visitors. Here is a quick and easy way to allow access to multiple IP addresses while redirecting everyone else to a custom message page.

To do this, all you need is an HTAccess file and a list of IPs for which you would like to allow access.

Edit the following code according to the proceeding instructions and place into the root HTAccess file of your domain:

# ALLOW ONLY MULTIPLE IPs
<Limit GET POST PUT>
 Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from 123.456.789
 Allow from 456.789.123
 Allow from 789.123.456
</Limit>
ErrorDocument 403 path/custom-message.html
<Files path/custom-message.html>
 Order Allow,Deny
 Allow from all
</Files>

To prepare this code for use on your site, do these three things:

1. Edit the three IP addresses to suit your needs. Feel free to add more IPs or remove any that aren’t needed.
2. Edit both instances of “path/custom-message.html” to match the path and file name of the file that will contain your custom message. This may be anything, anywhere, with any functionality you desire.
3. That’s it. Copy/paste into your site’s root htaccess file, upload, test, and get out!

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Stolen content is the bane of every blogger who provides a publicly available RSS feed. By delivering your content via feed, you make it easy for scrapers to assimilate and re-purpose your material on their crap Adsense sites. It’s bad enough that someone would re-post your entire feed without credit, but to use it for cheap money-making schemes is about as pathetic as it gets. If you’re lucky, the bastards may leave all the links intact, so at least you will get a few back-links (if you have been linking internally) and get notified of the stolen content as well (via pingback or Google Alert). Lately, however, many of the scraper sites that I have seen are completely removing all links within the stolen content. Incidentally, there are some tell-tale signs that the site you are visiting is a scraper site:

• No RSS feed available
• Many quality posts that contain no links
• Many quality posts but very low subscriber count
• Great content but with zero comments on any posts
• Lots of good content but with lots of Adsense or other ads
• No “About” page or business information
• And the number one brain-dead giveaway: no contact form or email address

If you pay attention as you surf around, you may want to keep an eye out for some of these dead giveaways. If it looks like the site is profiting from stolen content, it is advisable to leave immediately and locate an original source of information (you could even be cool and report the scraper site to the original author). I.e., help strengthen the legit blogging community and don’t support scrapers in any way. But avoiding scraper sites is merely an afterthought. The real challenge is to have a solid strategy in place that will help you identify, eliminate and prevent stolen content. Unfortunately, there is no “magic cure” that will stop the scrapers from stealing your hard work — apart from running a private site or not providing a feed — but there are many great tools that have proven quite effective in fighting the war against stolen content. While not completely exhaustive, here are some powerful tips and tricks that have served me well over the years:

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