Perishable Press

Arabic Version of Contact Coldform Released

Announcing an improved, Arabic version of my latest WordPress plugin, Contact Coldform. The new version features complete UTF-8 compatibility and has been completely translated to the Arabic language. Here is a detailed breakdown of changes made for the Arabic version: Completely translated to Arabic Encoded in UTF-8 without BOM Emails now sent in HTML format Added line breaks in HTML format Right-to-left text presentation Customized layout for Arabic Full UTF-8 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Rethinking Site Functionality, Presentation, and Structure

Two weeks ago, I decided to completely overhaul Perishable Press. The decision came after several months of smooth sailing with excellent site performance, an optimized theme, plenty of visitors, and even a comfortable posting schedule. All things considered, everything was peachy keen — until I began reflecting on the “big picture,” meditating upon certain aspects that are frequently taken for granted ...

Plenty of Errors to Chew On..

Alrighty then! Looks like recent changes to site structure have really dropped a bomb on quite a few regular visitors out there. After switching over to the new default theme last night, I had setup an email notification system to alert me of all errors encountered at this domain (i.e., the main site and all test sites). Of course, I knew that at least a few errors would be ...

New Widgetized Version of AddMySite Released!

It must be national “update-your-WordPress-plugins” month around here or something. First a completely renovated version of Category LiveBookmarks Plus, then a WP-2.3-compatible facelift for BlogStats PCC, and now a completely widgetized & automated version of the popular ...

New Version of BlogStats PCC for WordPress 2.3

Just a note to announce the release of a new version of BlogStats PCC. BlogStats PCC is a free WordPress plugin that provides an easy way to share your blog’s core statistics with your visitors. You can show off any or all of the following statistics: total number of posts total number of comments total number of categories total number of registered users total number of unregistered users total number of individual, static pages the date of the most recent post modification a link to ...

Rocking the Boat

Ladies and gentlemen, things have become a little too comfortable around here. Themes are displaying with nary a hitch, files are being downloaded as expected, URLs are served like butter, and the site is experiencing fewer errors (PHP, 404, etc.) than ever before. After two years of perpetual updating, posting, fixing, and tweaking, Perishable Press is finally performing exactly as desired (all things considered, of course). Yes sir, ...

New Version of Category LiveBookmarks Plus for WordPress 2.3

CLB+ As many WordPress users now realize, there have been many fundamental changes in the new version of WordPress. The latest version of WordPress — 2.3 — features a considerably revamped database structure, including a complete reorganization and redistribution of the wp_categories table. Unfortunately, such database alterations have rendered inoperable many popular plugins, proving quite unfortunate not only for millions of WordPress users, but also for those of us who ...

Much ado about Taglines

When I first began Perishable Press, I intended the site to focus primarily on the creative side of web and graphic design. However, I also wanted to share equally my ideas and experiences involving music, video, and other multimedia avenues of creative expression. Further, because I enjoy writing, and find myself frequently focusing on art, inspiration, and artistic expression, the initial plan encompassed a perpetual exploration and presentation of these topics here at Perishable Press. Two years later, ...

WordPress 2.1 Blogroll Nightmare and Lessons Learned

[ Keywords: wordpress, blogroll, bookmarks, links, upgrade, update, lessons ] Here at Perishable Press, we like to stay current by running the latest version of WordPress. The site launched in 2005 with WordPress 1.5 (Strayhorn), eventually made the jump to version 2.0 (Duke), recently stepped up to 2.0.1 (Still Duke), and currently enjoys 2.0.5 (Ronan). Although each of these ...

New Version of AddMySite Released!

We are happy to announce the release of AddMySite (AMS) version 0.77. The new version features support for syndicated content feeds, and enables users to add their site’s feed to fifteen different feed-syndication and social-aggregator sites. Plus, the new version of AMS includes twenty-five social-bookmarking services to which users may easily add your site. The entire list of 40 sites is concisely presented via drop-down menu or as a customizable list. One file. ...

WordPress 2.1 Released

As promised, the fine folks at WordPress have released WordPress 2.1, which has been named "Ella" after jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald. The new version features several key improvements, including lossless XML import/export, spell checking, post Autosave, and even a new search-engine privacy option. All that, and much more. Reading through the vast list of changes and developer features, we are quite excited to dive in and explore the ...

Feed Tester

Ignore this post.. [Edit] Note to WP 2.0.5 users: Everything was working fine on this site before upgrading to WP 2.0.5. After upgrading, apparently, our feeds stopped validating* and the BDP RSS Aggregator plugin refused to update our own feeds. After several hours investigating the situation, we determined that the Live Comment Preview plugin was interfering with our feeds validating, while the upgraded WordPress (2.0.5) was responsible for problems with the BDP plugin. Here is a copy of ...

Perishable Press Upgrade to WordPress 2.0.5

Perishable Press is now running WordPress 2.0.5. Everything went very well as we upgraded directly from version 2.0.2. Please report any errors or unusual/unexpected behavior (concerning this site). Your help is much appreciated.  

AddMySite Plugin for WordPress

Compatible with WordPress 2.3! The AddMySite (AMS) plugin for WordPress makes it easy for your visitors to add your site to all of their favorite social-bookmarking services. With a few clicks, users may easily bookmark or add your site to any number of popular social bookmarking services, which are concisely presented via drop-down menu or as a customizable list. One file. Simple installation. Easy to use. Clean output and XHTML strict. New! — ...

New Version of Category LiveBookmarks Available

Thanks to some valuable feedback, several inconsistencies were discovered in our Category LiveBookmarks plugin for WordPress. If you are using CLB+ version 1.1.1, check carefully your feed links -- you may discover that your feed links are being written twice in both the document head and (if applicable) the document body. Further, it was requested that the plugin produce a complete set of links for various WP page views, such as category views and archive views, rather ...

WordPress Core File Edits at Perishable Press

Update: After upgrading Perishable Press in 2007, many of the hacks listed on this page are no longer applicable. Please refer to our new WordPress Core Edits for current information. Otherwise, this article remains online for reference purposes only. The folks developing WordPress are continually rolling out “upgrades”. While it is generally a good idea to stay current, it can also be a bit ...

Perishable Press Redesign

For many months, visitors to Perishable Press encountered the highly customized Jupiter! theme. Utilizing sIFR, Prototype, Lightbox, and several other bandwidth-heavy scripts, the Jupiter! theme weighs in at well over 400KB/page when saved as an offline copy. The Jupiter! theme also employs every plugin used here at Perishable Press, resulting in even slower performance for broadband users, and utterly painful experiences for those on modem/dial-up. Recently, we decided to ...

Category LiveBookmarks Plus

Compatible with WordPress 2.3! CLB+ New version of Category LiveBookmarks Plus now available! CLB+ 2.3.0b enables WordPress 2.3+ users to configure and customize the ultimate set of autodetection feeds, category feeds, category links, and feed links. Features include completely rewritten, optimized code, optional category post counts, and custom RSS-icon links for all category and/or feed links. Overall, the new version is faster and more flexible than ever! Category LiveBookmarks Plus is ...

Passing Quotation Marks via wp_link_pages

According to the WordPress Codex 1, it is possible to pass quotation marks via the parameters of the function, wp_link_pages(). This would enable users to assign a particular css class or id to the function output, thereby providing greater design and behavioral control over that particular object. But alas, as reported several times in the WordPress Codex 2, wp_link_pages() is unable to pass quotes without causing errors. To fix this, we open template-functions-post.php and find wp_link_pages(), which is located ...

Reversing WordPress Page Navigation Order

This article explains how to reverse the order of WordPress page navigation links. To reverse the default (backward) order of page navigation in WordPress, open the file template-functions-links.php (in WP 2.0) or link-template.php (in WP 2.1/2.2) and scroll down to the last function, posts_nav_link() 1. Next, find the last if statement and switch the order of the following two lines: previous_posts_link($prelabel); [ ignore this line ] next_posts_link($nxtlabel, $max_page); Next, within the first line of the same function ...

WordPress Plugin Central

Welcome to WordPress Plugin Central! Here we will organize, review, and log any changes made to the plugins used here at Perishable Press. Our first task involves listing all of the plugins used as of May 29, 2006 (Note: This list is updated with every plugin modification and is current as of the “Edited on” date in the “Post Metadata” section to the left of this post): Plugins used at Perishable Press AddMySite (AMS)...

Create New Permalink Category

If you are running WordPress 2.0.2 and have enabled permalinks, you may have had problems creating a new category or page to your site. I recently encountered this dilemma and devised the following strategy for adding, editing, or even deleting WordPress categories and pages. Note: this tutorial assumes you are running Apache. First, open wp-includes/vars.php and find (around line #39): $is_apache = ( strstr($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') || strstr($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') ) ? 1 : 0; Comment out that line and add the ...

Customize Password-Protected Posts

To customize WordPress-powered password-protected posts such as this one, follow these simple steps. First open template-functions-post.php and find the function get_the_password_form, which is located near the top of the page. There are several aspects of this function that you may wish to customize. For example, the Perishable Press website requires several CSS attributes for stylistic control. Thus we simply added the class postpassword to the form input field, as well as the class passwordsubmit ...

Perishable Press Server Migration

As you may have read, we recently transferred our websites to a new server. Although the overall process went smoothly enough, several learning opportunities unfolded during the transfer of our humble Perishable Press website... First, the setup. Perishable Press is a WordPress-powered website. On our previous server, we were running a Fantastico-installed WordPress version 2.0.2, upgraded from version 2.0. Permalinks were enabled and everything was running smoothly. ...

Title Attributes for WordPress Post Navigation

Improve accessibility by adding title attributes to your WordPress userspace. This article applies specifically to WordPress 2.0.2, but may be generalized to any WP 2.0+ version. By default, WordPress navigation links omit the title attributes for both page and post views. Title attributes for links provide additional information that can improve the accessibility of your website. This is especially true when images or text symbols exclusively are used for navigation. To add title attributes to WordPress page-view links (e.g., links ...

Permalink Enlightenment

I recently enabled the permalinks feature for a fresh WordPress 2.0.2 upgrade. The process required several hours of research and approximately 90 minutes to fully implement. This brief article summarizes the process and applies to at least the following setup: WordPress 2.0.2 Apache Server with mod_rewrite enabled The ability to access/modify your .htaccess file(s) You have decided to use the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ permalink format (actually, any format will work; simply swap your preferred format for the one mentioned here) You may also be ...

WordPress Notes Plus

Welcome to Perishable Press! This article covers many different aspects of WordPress functionality, including customizing quicktags, deleting the cache, numbering comments & posts, changing password text, and displaying archive menus. Note that this article was written for previous versions (i.e., less than 2.0) of WordPress. Discrepancies may exist between the code presented in this post and that of more recent versions of WordPress. Nonetheless, this information is presented for ...

Stupid htaccess Tricks

Welcome to Perishable Press! This article, Stupid htaccess Tricks, covers just about every htaccess “trick” in the book, and is easily the site’s most popular offering. In addition to this htaccess article, you may also want to explore the rapidly expanding htaccess tag archive. Along with all things htaccess, Perishable Press also focuses on ...

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