Category Archive for “Perishable” [ page 2 ]

Thinking About a Redesign and Trying to Get Unstuck

I want to redesign Perishable Press. The current design was released around a year ago, and has received numerous compliments and criticisms. Compliments tend to focus on the theme’s minimalist sensibilities, while criticism is generally directed at the design’s poor usability. Personally, I find the “grey-on-black” color scheme to be very inspiring. Others, however, have difficulties reading the content, and that’s not good. So, throughout the course of the past year, the notion of yet another redesign has been slowly building momentum. Part of me could continue using the current theme for several ...

Another Exciting Perishable News Update

It’s been awhile since my last personal news post, and I figure that enough has been happening to warrant yet another exciting news update. Yay! ;) So let’s see, first on my mind is the recent launch of the new design for Monzilla Media, the official site for my personal website and graphic design business. The first two versions of the site were single-page brochure sites, but this new version is fully loaded, featuring tons of portfolio content, business news, and service information. If you’ve got a minute, I would love to hear your feedback! Speaking of new ...

Open Call for Guest Posts at Perishable Press

After much deliberation, I have decided to take a short vacation away from the computer. I have been working like a dog recently, and feel that a change of pace would help recharge the ‘ol brain cells. I haven’t decided exactly when it will be, but I am thinking that some time off in August (my favorite month) would be swell. Maybe go to the coast, do some traveling, take a long nap, or whatever. Technically, I haven’t taken a break from blogging here at Perishable Press in almost three years! So it’s definitely time.. Generally, I like to post three or four times ...

Stealth Publish Test Post

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

Perishable Press Gets Naked

In celebration of CSS Naked Day, Perishable Press has disabled it’s CSS stylesheet for today, April 9th, 2008 (which also happens to be my 36th birthday)! What are you waiting for? Go get naked!! ;)

Perishable Press Comment Policy

Before you comment here at Perishable Press, please take a moment to review the official comment policy. Here is a simplified overview of the complete policy: Comments are open to everyone. Name and email are required. Email kept private, never shared. Website URL optional. The form accepts basic XHTML. Line and paragraph breaks automatic. Please wrap each segment or line of code in tags (no tags). I reserve the right to edit/delete any comment. Spam will be deleted. Pointless and otherwise lame comments may be deleted. Please stay on topic and comment intelligently. Official Comment Policy First, ...

Perishable Press Theme Renovations Complete

Finally, after many grueling weeks of relentless determination and tedious repetition, I am pleased to announce the return of the entire collection of Perishable Press themes. Enabling users to change the appearance and functionality of the site, the fifteen unique themes were dismantled several months ago for the ongoing Perishable Press site renovation. Since then, links referring to the removed themes had been redirected to a temporary “Labs” subdomain (labs.perishablepress.com), which featured various installations of WordPress populated with “lorem ipsum” filler text. Although this was suitable as a temporary fix for those interested in exploring the different themes, full theme renovation ...

Perishable News: Site Upgrades, Upcoming Interview, and PageRank Update

Ever since writing that last review article, I have been feeling the need to cut loose, relax, and blog about something a little more “down-to-earth,” like recent things that have been happening around here. If you are new to Perishable Press, rest assured that I try to keep these “site/personal news” update posts down to a minimum. Whenever possible, I save up a bunch of interesting off-topic things that I want to talk about, and then cram them all together into a multipurpose article like this one. I have found that ...

Perishable Press Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.3

Just a note to announce a site upgrade to WordPress 2.3.3. The upgrade went well, but overall server performance continues to suffer. I am aware that some people are experiencing difficulties leaving comments and even accessing the site in general. Rest assured, I am working with my hosting company, A Small Orange, to get everything back on track and running smooth. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issues, restore full functionality, and return to reliable performance. Please share any helpful observations regarding the site here. — Thanks!

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. ...

More Server Mayhem

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 ...

A Dramatic Week Here at Perishable Press..

..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, ...

Site News: Bad Behavior Spasm, Switching to New VPS Server..

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 ...

WordPress Core Hacks Used at Perishable Press

One of the necessary evils associated with creating a highly customized WordPress-powered site involves the inevitable necessity to hack the WordPress core. WordPress is built for mass-consumption and tends to cater to the largest audience possible, making it necessary to bend and poke around the corners to get WordPress to function in a more specific or specialized capacity. Of course, there is a major downside to tweaking core WordPress files: upgrading. The overambitious WordPress peeps are constantly rolling out upgrade after upgrade, many of which are required security fixes, patches, or whatever. The point is that editing the WordPress core on your current version of WordPress requires that you edit each and ...

Temporary Site Downtime

Just a note to let everyone know that Perishable Press will be undergoing site maintenance for the next several hours. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this might cause. Thanks for your patience ;)

Perishable Press Site Renovation Strategy

Now that my recent site overhaul project is nearly complete, I thought it would be useful to share my carefully developed “plan of attack.” The following seven-step strategy is designed to facilitate the entire renovation by logically ordering events and breaking down complex tasks. Upon execution, the following plan is designed to improve overall site functionality, presentation and structure, while factoring in several critical parameters: Modular time organization — due to my hectic schedule, it is necessary to break large projects down into manageable chunks. Separation of main site from ...

Perishable Press Turns Two

To celebrate the second anniversary of Perishable Press, I am taking the day off! To fill the virtual cyber-vacuum left in the absence of today’s regularly scheduled post, allow me to highlight a few of my favorite articles from our second year online: Roll your own Apache Rewrite Log Chunks 101: Introduction to Chunkology Maximum and Minimum Height and Width in Internet Explorer Feed your Image via Atom or RSS...