All CSS Filter Functions + Quick Copy/Paste Examples
CSS makes it easy to customize image appearance on the fly. So you don’t have to crank open your image editor and do any work there. You can apply many visual effects directly on the image using the CSS filter property. You can change image brightness, contrast, opacity, saturation — even do things like rotate hues, drop shadows, and blur the image. Browser support is solid for all major browsers. Continue reading »
Self-Hosted, Domain-Based Email Addresses FTW
I use domain-based emails for 99% of my email activity. The other 1% is comprised of assorted 3rd-party email services and temporary slash disposable addresses (like for testing purposes and one-off sign-ups, etc.). I can tell you whole-heartedly based on 20+ years working online that self-hosted email is THE WAY to go. Continue reading »
DIY Server Uptime Monitor
There are many free (and commercial) uptime monitoring services that will alert you if your server goes offline. These services are popular because it’s mission critical to know when your sites are down. The sooner you know about it, the sooner you can scramble to get everything back online. I’ve tried other scripts and services but nothing that met my specific needs: simple, secure, lightweight and blazing fast. So decided roll my own DIY server status monitor and share it […] Continue reading »
Margin Offset for Anchor Targets with CSS or JavaScript
For sites using a fixed-position “sticky” header or similar, it’s necessary to add an offset margin to any on-page anchor targets. For example this recent article provides a Table of Contents menu with links to each section on the page. Click a link and the page scrolls down to the target element, which is an <h2></h2> heading tag. Thanks to one of the CSS solutions provided in this tutorial, the scrolling takes into account the page’s 50-pixel sticky header, so […] Continue reading »
All the Hyphens & Dashes
Typography is inspiring :) I recently posted about all the different HTML “X” characters. Then a tweet from Helge Klein inspired me to write a follow-up post showing all the different ways to write a dash or hyphen – character in HTML. Like most online content creators, I knew about – and —. But I didn’t realize there were so many other hyphen and dash characters. Continue reading »
WordPress get_comments_number() Not Working Correctly?
It seems that the WordPress function, get_comments_number(), is not working correctly. It is returning inconsistent results for posts with zero comments, pingbacks, or trackbacks. Sometimes the function returns true, other times false. It’s just random, from what I’ve been able to tell. So maybe a bug, or maybe something I am missing. Not a big deal, just looking for clues.. Continue reading »
WordPress: Display Posts on a Page with Paging and Navigation
In WordPress themes and plugins, the Loop is used to display posts on the front end. Typically the Loop displays either a single post (like when you’re viewing a blog post), or multiple posts (like when you’re viewing a category archive). Things get more tricky however, when you want to display posts on a page. Continue reading »
Breaking Away from Big Social Media
It feels SO GOOD to move away from big social media sites. You know the ones. During the first few years when Facebook and Twitter were first getting started (like back around 2007 ish), I followed the herd and jumped on board. Started posting stuff. Added the little social buttons on all of my websites. Even wrote some tutorials about Twitter and other social media. I was into it. Big time. These days though, not so much. More and more, […] Continue reading »
Redirect Stupid Bots to Existing Resources
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m on another one of my posting sprees. Going through the past year’s worth of half-written drafts and collected code snippets, and sharing anything that might be useful or interesting. Here is a bit of .htaccess that brings together several redirection techniques into a singular plug-&-play code snippet. Continue reading »
Evolution of a Work Schedule
My journey from working a boring full-time production job to working as an independent web developer began almost 20 years ago. I spent the first five or six years working two full-time jobs. On top of my regular 40-hour a week job, I worked another 30 to 40 hours a week learning how to build websites. Continue reading »
Simple Request Router via PHP and Apache/.htaccess
I’ve written many articles about how to redirect requests. Even so, I still get questions about how to set up a simple HTTP request router. As in you want to redirect or route all requests to some file or location. This is useful for building CMSs and scripts that handle traffic. For example, WordPress uses a simple request router when permalinks are enabled. For this tutorial, we’ll set this up using Apache/.htaccess and PHP. Continue reading »
Deleting Unused Online Accounts
Like many of you, I have been working online for years now, more than most. Over the course of the past 20 years, I have created accounts at hundreds and hundreds of websites. That includes all the work-related stuff, like web development, plus LOTS of social media sites, online services for everything from email to security monitoring. Not to mention all of the accounts created for mundane things like banking, utilities, Internet and phone service, and so forth. Continue reading »
Target User Agents and Reduce Spam via robots.txt
Your website’s robots.txt file probably contains some rules that tell compliant search engines and other bots which pages they can visit, and which are not allowed, etc. In most of the robots.txt files that I’ve looked at, all of the Allow and Disallow rules are applied to all user agents. This is done with the wildcard operator, which is written as an asterisk *, like this: User-agent: * This site’s robots.txt file provides a typical example. All of the allow/disallow […] Continue reading »
Disable Highlighting in Comments with Prismatic WordPress Plugin
Prismatic is a free WordPress plugin that adds syntax highlighting to code samples. You can use either Highlight.js or Prism.js to make your code snippets look amazing. By default, Prismatic highlights code snippets in both post content and post comments. This quick tutorial shows how to disable highlighting in post comments by adding a simple code snippet to your WordPress. Estimated time to complete ~2 minutes. Continue reading »
Filtered Language Menus with Prismatic WordPress Plugin
Prismatic is a free WordPress plugin that adds syntax highlighting to code samples. You can use either Highlight.js or Prism.js to make your code snippets look amazing. This quick tutorial shares a way to customize Prismatic to save time scrolling thru a bunch of language options. Huge time-saver and simple to implement in a few minutes. Continue reading »
Subscribers: Update Your Feed URLs
This post is for any feed subscribers out there.. please update your feed URL if you want to continue getting Perishable Press articles in your feed reader. Again for those in the back: update the feed URL for Perishable Press if you want to stay subscribed. This is necessary because Google finally has killed the once awesome Feedburner service. Continue reading »
