Book Winners!
Today I am pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 Book Giveaway, wherein 9 contestants win free copies of my books — The Tao of WordPress, WordPress Themes In Depth, and .htaccess made easy — including all bonus material and updates. Continue reading »
Clever Popup Ad? No Thanks.
So these days, I’m seeing more “clever” popups when visiting various websites. For example, do a search, see a result, click to visit.. and then before any content is shown, I’m hit with some annoying popup ad for whatever thing the site is trying to push. Continue reading »
Giving Away More Books!
A few days ago, I launched a Thanksgiving-themed book giveaway for Digging Into WordPress. The post has received some great comments that reminded me of how absolutely awesome people can be. So to chase the feeling and keep the momentum going, I’m giving away more books to 9 lucky winners. Continue reading »
WordPress Themes In Depth
Book Launch! My fourth book, WordPress Themes In Depth, focuses entirely on WordPress theme development. It goes in-depth on how to build, customize, and distribute your own WordPress themes. It’s 10+ years of experience with WordPress jam-packed into 450 pages of non-stop theme-building action. Continue reading »
CSS Dropdown Menu in WordPress
In this tutorial I am going to show you how to build a pure CSS drop down menu in WordPress. I will walk you through the steps of creating a menu in WordPress, customizing it with CSS, and then printing the menu in your theme file. This tutorial requires that you have access to edit your WordPress theme files and also a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. I will walk through the process step-by-step so don’t worry if you […] Continue reading »
How to Purge Deleted Dropbox Files
About a week ago, I sent a support request to Dropbox asking how to purge deleted files. Never heard anything back, but I figured that I would ask here to see if anyone knows the magic recipe. Here is the support question I sent to the Dropbox team: Continue reading »
Protect Against Malicious POST Requests
Whether you like it or not, there are scripts and bots out there hammering away at your sites with endless HTTP “POST” requests. POST requests are sort of the opposite of GET requests. Instead of getting some resource or file from the server, data is being posted or sent to it. To illustrate, normal surfing around the Web involves your browser making series of GET requests for all the resources required for each web page. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, et […] Continue reading »
Protect Against Humans.txt Query-String Scans
I woke up this morning to the sound of thousands of 404 requests hitting the server. It’s sad that there are kiddies out there who have nothing better to do than buy some pathetic $50 script and then sit there like an imbecile harassing people for hours on end. But alas, that is the world we live in — fortunately it’s less than trivial to block the entire scan with just a few lines of good old .htaccess. Continue reading »
WordPress Plugin: USP Pro
After months of deleopment and a low-key “soft-launch”, I’m pleased to announce my first premium WordPress plugin, USP Pro, the supercharged version of my free WP plugin, User Submitted Posts. USP Pro enables you to create and customize infinitely many front-end forms and display them anywhere on your WordPress-powered site. Continue reading »
Testing HTTP Requests
Just a quick post with some tips for troubleshooting and testing HTTP requests. For example, if you have a plugin that sends requests behind the scenes via Ajax or cURL or whatever, it’s nice to have a way to view request details such as headers, the response, and everything in between. This article is aimed primarily at WordPress users, but contains more general tips and tricks as well. Continue reading »
2014 Micro Blacklist
Over the past several months, I’ve assembled a “micro” blacklist to keep some recent threats at bay. Eventually, this will be integrated into the next nG Blacklist, but for now I just wanted to post and share with anyone else who is actively monitoring their server logs and aware of the recent spike in malicious activity. Continue reading »
Theme Update: shapeSpace v1.7
shapeSpace is the starter WordPress theme that I use to build sites like Plugin-Planet.com and DigWP.com. I use it because it includes all of the most commonly used template tags and a minimal amount of clean markup. Additonally, shapeSpace includes a robust set of custom functions that make it easy to add and modify theme features and functionality. Continue reading »
