Perishable Press Now Featured on Planet WordPress

Today I am happy to announce that Perishable Press has been deemed worthy of citizenship on Planet WordPress! Planet WordPress is an incredible WordPress resource, bringing together some of the Web’s finest WordPress contributors, plugin developers, and theme designers. The ...

Easily Adaptable WordPress Loop Templates

In this article, I present several heavily commented examples of WordPress loops. I have found that many readers appreciate these types of loop examples, as it helps them to understand how the loop works while enabling them to easily copy, paste, and adapt the code for their own purposes. In our first example, we examine a basic WordPress ...

Site Overhaul, Phase Two: Switching Default Theme

Just a note to let everyone know that I am switching the site’s default theme this evening. The new theme is similar, yet different (drop by to see what I mean), and will be switched over as soon as everything is ready behind the scenes (plugins, etc.). Also, until I am able to update the mobile CSS styles, the site may appear a little bonkers when viewed via mobile device. In the meantime, as ...

WordPress Lessons Learned, Part 1: Permalink Structure

While planning my current site renovation project, I considered changing the format of my permalinks. Reasons for modifying the permalink structure of a site include: Optimizing URLs for the search engines Simplifying URL structure for improved readability Removing the implication that your site content is somehow organized chronologically Removing other unwanted organizational implications (e.g., categorically, topically, etc.) Like many people who configured WordPress permalinks a couple of years ago, ...

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 ...

WordPress Spam Battle: 3 Seconds that will Save You Hours of Time

In the hellish battle against spam, many WordPress users have adopted a highly effective trinity of anti-spam plugins: Akismet Bad Behavior Spam Karma This effective triage of free WordPress plugins has served many a WP-blogger well, eliminating virtually 99% of all automated comment-related spam. When spam first became a problem for me, I installed this triple-threat arsenal of anti-spam plugins and immediately enjoyed the results. Although Spam Karma seemed ...

htaccess Combo Pack: WordPress Permalinks and non-www Redirect

WordPress users employing permalinks via htaccess to optimize their dynamic URLs transform complicated-looking links such as: http://example.com/blog/index.php?page=33 ..into search-engine friendly links such as: http://example.com/blog/post-title/ Every rewritten URL relies on a common set of htaccess rules to transform the links. The htaccess rules for all WordPress permalinks look like this for root WP installations: # BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond ...

Much ado about nofollow: The Perishable Press Dofollow Series

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Oh great, not another article about WordPress nofollow!!” Well, if that sounds like you, I have good news! This is the last post (at least for awhile, anyway) concerning all things nofollow, dofollow, and even no-nofollow, for that matter. In fact, this post isn’t even about nofollow! It’s simply a summary of the articles I have written involving nofollow-related topics. The articles fit together so well, one might suppose they ...

Hacking WordPress: The Ultimate Nofollow Blacklist

Several days ago, I posted an article explaining how to hack your own WordPress nofollow blacklist. Immediately thereafter, I published an elaborate article focusing on automatic methods of nofollow blacklisting via WordPress plugins. In this article, I expand on the original blacklist hack by ...

Hacking WordPress: Dofollow Whitelist for Commentator Links

Before repenting of my filthy “nofollow” addiction, I experimented briefly with a “dofollow whitelist” for commentator URL links. The idea behind the whitelist is to reward frequent commentators, feed subscribers, site patrons, and other guests by selectively removing the automatically generated nofollow attributes from their associated comment-author links. For nofollow enthusiasts, ...

WordPress Plugins Featuring Nofollow Blacklist Functionality

Is that spam or are you just trying to comment? Removing nofollow attributes from your WordPress-powered site is a great way to encourage comments and attract visitors. Many commentators will leave useful, constructive feedback, but there will always be a few losers who would attempt to game your generous link love. Fortunately, identifying these mindless link whores is relatively easy. Here are a few priceless examples of actual spam (i.e., linked) comments left here at Perishable Press (links ...

Hacking WordPress: Nofollow Blacklist for Commentator Links

Previously, in our unofficial “WordPress dofollow upgrade” series, we dished several techniques for removing the antisocial nofollow attributes from default installations of WordPress. After an exhaustive review of available dofollow plugins, we explained how drop-dead easy it is to transform ...

Industrial Strength WordPress Dofollow Upgrade

Encourage Comments by Completely Eliminating All Nofollow Links Want to remove all traces of the hideous nofollow attribute without having to install yet another unnecessary plugin? By default, WordPress generates nofollow links in three different ways — this article will show you how to eliminate all of them.. Some context please.. Note: if you are already familiar with the various functions involved in the nofollow-removal process, please feel free to skip the proceeding discussion and ...

The Deluxe One-Minute Dofollow WordPress Upgrade

After our previous article, we all know how easy it is to kill the default nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator, trackback, and pingback links. Indeed, our original one-minute upgrade delivers dofollow links across the board, effectively passing the love juice to every type of response. Fine for some, but some need more.. In this article, we improve the original dofollow upgrade by differentiating between the three different response ...

The One-Minute Dofollow WordPress Upgrade

Want to upgrade your blog to official dofollow status but don’t want to install another unnecessary plugin? This article explains how to eliminate nofollow tags from all trackback, pingback, and commentator links in less than one minute.. After finally repenting of my nofollow sins, I began looking for the best way to eliminate the nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator URL links. Of course, the most ...

Comprehensive Reference for WordPress NoNofollow/Dofollow Plugins

Recently, while deliberating an optimal method for eliminating nofollow link attributes from Perishable Press, I collected, installed, tested and reviewed every WordPress no-nofollow/dofollow plugin that I could find. As of the writing of this post, I have evaluated 12 dofollow plugins, all of which are freely available on the Internet. In this article, I present a concise, current, and comprehensive reference for WordPress no-nofollow and dofollow plugins. ...

Repenting of My Nofollow Sins

Hello, my name is Jeff and I am nofollow addict. When I first began Perishable Press two years ago, in August of 2005, WordPress quickly became my blogging platform of choice. Everything about WordPress was great, so I had no trouble overlooking a few seemingly insignificant quirks, such as the nofollow attributes that are automatically applied to all comment links. In fact, at first, I really had no idea what they were or how they affected my ...

Stop WordPress from Leaking PageRank to Admin Pages

[ Keywords: wordpress, pagerank, pr, admin, pages, login, register, meta, robots, search, google ] During the most recent Perishable Press redesign, I noticed that several of my WordPress admin pages had been assigned significant levels of PageRank. Not good. After some investigation, I realized that my ancient robots.txt rules were insufficient in preventing Google from indexing various WordPress admin pages. Specifically, the following pages have been indexed and subsequently assigned PageRank: WP Admin Login Page ...

Web Host Recommendation: A Small Orange Delivers Superior Service

Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features: Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth Unlimited Email accounts, MySQL databases and everything else A Small Orange delivers all of the above in ...

Super Loop: Exclude Specific Categories and Display any Number of Posts

[ Keywords: wordpress, loop, have_posts, category, categories, post, posts, asides, excerpts ] Readers occasionally ask for help with their WordPress loops. Usually, these requests involve modifying the loop with some customized functionality. Frequently, such customization involves one of these popular behaviors: Exclude a specific category Exclude multiple categories Display only one post or excerpt Display some fixed number of ...

Another Mystery Solved..

Recently, after researching comment links for an upcoming article, I realized that my default values were being submitted as the URL for all comments left without associated website information. During the most recent site redesign, I made the mistake of doing this in comments.php: ... ... Notice the value="[website]" attribute? It seemed like a good idea at the time — I even threw in a ...

WP-ShortStat Slowing Down Root Index Pages

[ Keywords: wp-shortstat, shortstat, wordpress, plugin, slow, country, ip, lookup, root, index, fix ] For over a year now, I have been using Markus Kämmerer’s (Happy Arts Blog) WP-ShortStat plugin for WordPress. The plugin is relatively well-maintained and remains one of my favorite admin tools. Great for popping in on stats without logging into Mint. Nonetheless, due to its IP/country-detection functionality, WP-ShortStat has experienced its share of difficulties (e.g., ...

WordPress Plugin: Export Blogroll for del.icio.us

[ Keywords: wordpress, plugin, export, blogroll, del.icio.us, bookmarks, links, import, upload ] Announcing an easy way to export and automatically format your WordPress Blogroll for import into your del.icio.us social bookmarking account! The Export Blogroll plugin for del.icio.us simplifies the process of transferring your WordPress Blogroll to your del.icio.us account. del.icio.us now provides a way to import multiple links with a single file, however the file must ...

Bookmark Exodus: Export the WordPress Blogroll and Import to del.icio.us

[ Keywords: import, export, upload, batch, bookmarks, links, wordpress, blogroll, del.icio.us ] After our recent WordPress-2.1 blogroll debacle, we concluded that the WordPress Links Manager (aka the Blogroll) is no longer a viable, long-term solution for managing bookmark collections containing large numbers of links. A far better solution, in the eyes of many savvy web users, is the free social bookmarking ...

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 ...

WordPress Basics: Uploading and Displaying Images

[ This article continues a series of tutorials covering the very basics of using WordPress. ] This brief tutorial outlines the process of uploading images and displaying them in your posts. This tutorial applies specifically to WordPress version 2.0+, but may be extrapolated to other versions. 1. Login and go to the Write Post panel If you have not done so already, login to the WordPress Admin area (for help with this, go here). ...

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 Basics: Setting the Date, Author, and other Post Options

[ This article continues a series of tutorials covering the very basics of using WordPress. ] Now that we are comfortable logging in, publishing a post, and saving and editing posts, it is time to look at a few other useful posting options. In this tutorial, we explain how to set and change the post date, post author, and several ...

WordPress Basics: Saving and Editing Posts

[ This article continues a series of tutorials covering the very basics of using WordPress. ] After logging in to WordPress and publishing a post, you may wish to return to the post for additional editing or to add new content. Or, perhaps you draft a post for which you would like to postpone publishing until later. This tutorial covers both of these processes. Editing a post ...

WordPress Basics: Publishing Posts

[ This article continues a series of tutorials covering the very basics of using WordPress. ] Once you have successfully logged in to the WordPress Admin area, you may want to publish a post. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Locate and click on the Write tab Within the WordPress Admin, there are many menu tabs. Each tab provides access to a different feature of WordPress. To write and publish a post, locate ...

WordPress Basics: Login to Admin

[ This article begins a series of tutorials covering the very basics of using WordPress. ] To login to the WordPress (WP) Administration area, follow these steps: 1. Go to the Admin Login screen Go to the WordPress login screen, generally located at http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php or http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/ (note: if WordPress has been installed in a subdirectory, the login screen should be located at http://yoursite.com/subdirectory/wp-login.php). 2. Enter your username and password The Admin screen presents two text fields: one ...

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 ...

Perishable Press Unresolved Error Log

This post is hereby dedicated to the official logging of all unresolved and/or unexplained errors encountered during development or implementation of various plugins, extensions, themes, scripts, and/or anything else that results in bizarre and mysterious errors, bugs, or other anomalies. Further, we will also post any potential solutions, fixes, workarounds, or explanations for any errors logged in this post. This information is provided for reference purposes only -- please share any related information you may have concerning ...

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 ...

Time Test

This post exists entirely for the sake of tweaking time functionality in Apache, PHP, SQL, and WordPress.. Immediate findings: Date/time limit into the past for WordPress: December 13, 1901 @ 15:45 WordPress will display December 13, 1901 @ 15:45 properly for all functions except wp_get_archives All dates prior to 12/13/1901 in MySQL will display as December 31, 1969 @ 19:00 in the WP Admin > Post Timestamp panel SQL timestamps of 0000-00-00 00:00:00 display as 0 via $wpdb->get_col("SELECT DISTINCT YEAR SQL timestamps of ...

Perishable Press Triple Loop for WordPress

Two of the themes developed by Perishable Press, Apathy and Information, depend on three WordPress loops to operate as intended. For each of these themes, the three loops consist of two "side" loops and one main loop. The side loops each display posts from one specific category, while the main loop displays posts from every category not specified in the side loops. There are many different multi-loop configurations ...

WordPress on Crack: Tips for Faster Post Publishing

Apparently, article posting is painfully slow on 2-ish versions of WordPress. Indeed, we finally got tired of waiting several minutes every time we published, saved, or edited a post. After a bit of research, reading through countless complaints and suggested remedies, several key methods began to emerge. And, after taking the time to implement them, we have definitely enjoyed an substantial decrease in time required to publish, save, or edit posts. Please ...

Block Spam by Denying Access to No-Referrer Requests

Credit for this trick goes to shoemoney.com. What we have here is an excellent method for preventing a great deal of blog spam. With a few strategic lines placed in your htaccess file, you can prevent spambots from dropping spam bombs by denying access to all requests that do not originate from your domain. How does it work? Well, when a legitimate user (i.e., not a robot, etc.) decides to leave a comment on your blog, ...

Add RSS Feed Link Icons to WordPress Category Listings

This brief tutorial explains two methods for adding RSS feed link icons to category listings. Let’s say that you have a list of category links, where each link targets a specific category view. Now let’s say that, next to each category link, you would like to provide a icon that links to that particular category’s syndicated feed. So, rather than cluttering up your page with two sets of category links -- one for category views and another ...

minimalist Theme

The minimalist theme is crisp and clean. Featuring a three-column satellite menu-page to reduce clutter and streamline usability, the minimalist theme is designed to present site content with sophistication and elegance. The minimalist theme is XHTML 1.1 strict, employs nearly valid CSS (ha!), and features browser-safe colors and universal fonts all delivered via concise, two-column liquid layout. Mindfully detailed and carefully prepared, the minimalist theme provides plenty of room for customization and expansion. This theme is offered absolutely ...

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 2.5+! 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! — ...

Theme Edits for IE7

This post is a working repository of code edits and other changes made to Perishable Press themes in order for them to function properly in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).. Jupiter Theme *:first-child+html div.comwrap { overflow: visible; } Lithium Theme *:first-child+html div.comwrap { overflow: visible; } Casket Theme Removed html selector from first ruleset.

Extreme Makeover for Gravatars in WordPress

Strategic Methods for Improving Gravatar Functionality in WordPress Gravatars have become a popular way of adding spice to the "comments" page of many WordPress-powered sites. So popular, in fact, that the gravatar server is often overloaded, bogged down with millions of gravatar requests every second. This immense server load effects user pages everywhere, resulting in slow loading times, unresolved server requests, and missing gravatars. Such broken presentations appear unprofessional, tarnish reputations, and may provoke ...

Customize WordPress Quicktags

Note: This condensed tutorial assumes you are working with WordPress 2+ and are familiar with editing .php and/or .js files. WordPress quicktags1 provide shortcuts for adding certain bits of code to your posts. The default set of quicktags includes some handy shortcut buttons for tags such as , , and , as well as a few others. While the default set of quicktag buttons is occasionally useful, a quick bit of quicktag customization can easily transform your personal ...

Perishable Press WordPress Plugins

Perishable Press currently offers three plugins for WordPress: Authenticate 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. All options are set via admin control ...

BlogStats PCC Plugin

Announcing the BlogStats PCC plugin for WordPress! BlogStats PCC is the easy way to display the total number of posts, comments, categories, as well as several other great statistics for your WordPress-powered website. With BlogStats PCC, you display only the information you want, where you want -- inside or outside of the WordPress loop. Completely customizable, BlogStats PCC will display any combination of statistics you choose. This plugin is highly flexible, simple to use, and completely free....

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