Category Archive for “Websites”

Here is a list of all articles categorized as “Websites”. If you enjoy the high-quality content that I provide here at Perishable Press, you may want to subscribe to our main content feed to stay current.

CSS Hacks for Different Versions of Firefox: In a perfect world, I don’t use CSS hacks, and certainly don’t recommend them. In the unpredictable, chaos of the real world, however, there are many situations where applying styles to particular browsers is indeed the optimal solution. Most of the time, I am targeting or filtering Internet Explorer (because it is so incredibly awesome), but occasionally I need to tweak something in a modern browser like Firefox, Safari, or Opera. In this article, we’ll look at CSS hacks targeting different versions of Firefox. Some of these CSS hacks don’t validate, others are proprietary, and ...
Dynamic Link Insertion via Unobtrusive External JavaScript: In my recent guest post at The Nexus, I discuss Google’s new nofollow policy and suggest several ways to deal with it. In that article, I explain how Google allegedly has changed the way it deals with nofollow links. Instead of transferring leftover nofollow juice to remaining dofollow links as they always have, Google now pours all that wonderful nofollow juice right down the drain. This shift in policy comes as a terrible surprise to many webmasters and SEO gurus, especially those who have invested vast amounts of time, effort ...
Block Multiple IP Addresses with PHP: Let’s face it. There’s just as much scum on the Internet as there is out there in the “real world.” Maybe even more, who knows. From scammers and spammers to scrapers and crackers, the Web is just crawling with all sorts of pathetic scumbags. As predictably random as much of the malicious activity happens to be, it is virtually guaranteed that you will be hounded by at least a few persistent IP addresses ...
9 Ways to Set Dynamic Body IDs via PHP and WordPress: When designing sites, it is often useful to identify different pages by adding an ID attribute to the element. Commonly, the name of the page is used as the attribute value, for example: In this case, “about” would be the body ID for the “About” page, which would be named something like “about.php”. Likewise, other pages would have unique IDs as well, for example: ..again, with each ID associated with the name of the page. This identification strategy is useful for a variety of reasons, including the following: Page-specific control over CSS via descendant selectors Page-specific DOM manipulation via ...
5-Minute PNG Image Optimization: A great way to improve the performance of your site is to optimize the size of your images. Smaller image sizes require less bandwidth, disk space and load time, and ultimately improve visitor experience. In this article, I share my effective 5-minute technique for optimizing PNG images. This is a two-step, lossless optimization process that removes as much extraneous data as possible without sacrificing any image quality whatsoever. It’s fast, free, and highly effective. Step 1: Optimize with OptiPNG or Pngcrush For the first (and most important) step in our image-optimization process, we want to run our PNG images through a command-line optimizer like ...
HTAccess Spring Cleaning 2009: Just like last year, this Spring I have been taking some time to do some general maintenance here at Perishable Press. This includes everything from fixing broken links and resolving errors to optimizing scripts and eliminating unnecessary plugins. I’ll admit, this type of work is often quite dull, however I always enjoy the process of cleaning up my HTAccess files. In this post, I share some of the changes made to my HTAccess files and explain the reasoning behind each ...
SEO Experiment: Let Google Sort it Out: One way to prevent Google from crawling certain pages is to use elements in the section of your web documents. For example, if I want to prevent Google from indexing and archiving a certain page, I would add the following code to the head of my document: I’m no SEO guru, but it is my general understanding that it is possible to manipulate the flow of page rank throughout a site through strategic implementation of directives. After thinking about it, I recently decided to remove the strategic directives from my pages here at Perishable Press. This ...
Best Practices for Error Monitoring: Given my propensity to discuss matters involving error log data (e.g., monitoring malicious behavior, setting up error logs, and creating extensive blacklists), I am often asked about the best way to go about monitoring 404 and other types of server errors. While I consider myself to be a novice in this arena (there are far brighter people with much greater experience), I do spend a lot of time digging through log entries and analyzing data. So, when asked recently about my error monitoring practices, I ...
4G Series: The Ultimate Referrer Blacklist, Featuring Over 8000 Banned Referrers: You have seen user-agent blacklists, IP blacklists, 4G Blacklists, and everything in between. Now, in this article, for your sheer and utter amusement, I present a collection of over 8000 blacklisted referrers. For the uninitiated, in teh language of teh Web, a referrer is the online resource from whence a visitor happened to arrive at your site. For example, if Johnny the Wonder Parrot was visiting the Mainstream Media website and ...
Perishable Press Featured at CSS Perk!: Yet another fine reason to celebrate the current Quintessential theme design here at Perishable Press is graciously provided by the fine folks at CSS Perk. CSS Perk features a growing collection of superior CSS-designed websites, and is always a great source of inspiration and ideas for new design projects. Seeing my current theme showcased at CSS Perk is very inspiring, and a super-cool way to celebrate my upcoming April-9th birthday. Many thanks to the awesome peeps at CSS Perk for sharing ...
4G Series: The Ultimate User-Agent Blacklist, Featuring Over 1200 Bad Bots: As discussed in my recent article, Eight Ways to Blacklist with Apache’s mod_rewrite, one method of stopping spammers, scrapers, email harvesters, and malicious bots is to blacklist their associated user agents. Apache enables us to target bad user agents by testing the user-agent string against a predefined blacklist of unwanted visitors. Any bot identifying itself as one of the blacklisted agents is immediately and quietly denied access. While this certainly isn’t the most effective method of securing your site against malicious behavior, it may certainly provide another layer of protection. Even so, there are ...
The Voice of the World Wide Web (Consortium): Check out this sweet composition of aural styles discovered in the stylesheet for the W3C’s website: /* AURAL STYLES (via W3C) */ @media aural { h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { voice-family: paul, male; stress: 20; richness: 90 } h1 { pitch: x-low; pitch-range: 90 } h2 { pitch: x-low; pitch-range: 80 } h3 { pitch: low; pitch-range: 70 } ...
The Perishable Press 4G Blacklist: At last! After many months of collecting data, crafting directives, and testing results, I am thrilled to announce the release of the 4G Blacklist! The 4G Blacklist is a next-generation protective firewall that secures your website against a wide range of malicious activity. Like its 3G predecessor, the 4G Blacklist is designed for use on Apache servers and is easily implemented via HTAccess or the httpd.conf configuration file. In order to function properly, the 4G Blacklist requires two specific Apache modules, ...
Yahoo! Slurp too Stupid to be a Robot: I really hate bad robots. When a web crawler, spider, bot — or whatever you want to call it — behaves in a way that is contrary to expected and/or accepted protocols, we say that the bot is acting suspiciously, behaving badly, or just acting stupid in general. Unfortunately, there are thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of nefarious bots violating our websites every minute of the day. For the most part, there are effective ...
Building the Perishable Press 4G Blacklist: Last year, after much research and discussion, I built a concise, lightweight security strategy for Apache-powered websites. Prior to the development of this strategy, I relied on several extensive blacklists to protect my sites against malicious user agents and IP addresses. Unfortunately, these mega-lists eventually became unmanageable and ineffective. As increasing numbers of attacks hit my server, I began developing new techniques for defending against external threats. This work ...
Controlling Proxy Access with HTAccess: In my recent article on blocking proxy servers, I explain how to use HTAccess to deny site access to a wide range of proxy servers. The method works great, but some readers want to know how to allow access for specific proxy servers while denying access to as many other proxies as possible. Fortunately, the solution is as simple as adding a few lines to my original proxy-blocking method. Specifically, we may allow any requests coming from our whitelist of proxy servers by testing Apache’s HTTP_REFERER variable, like so: RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(.*)allowed-proxy-01.domain.tld(.*) RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(.*)allowed-proxy-02.domain.tld(.*) RewriteCond ...
Remove the WWW Prefix for all URLs via PHP: Canonical URLs are important for maintaining consistent linkage, reducing duplicate content issues, and increasing the overall integrity of your site. In addition to cleaning up trailing slashes and removing extraneous index.php and index.html strings, removing the www subdirectory prefix is an excellent way to shorten links and deliver consistent, canonical URLs. Of course, an optimal way of removing (or adding) the www prefix is accomplished via HTAccess canonicalization: # universal www canonicalization via htaccess # remove www prefix for all urls - replace all domain and tld with yours # http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/04/30/universal-www-canonicalization-via-htaccess/ RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.tld$ ...

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