About Perishable Press

Perishable Press is the work of Jeff Starr, professional developer, designer, author, and publisher with two decades of experience. Check out some of Jeff’s books and projects, follow on Twitter, or learn more here on the About page.

About the author..

[ Jeff Starr (aka Perishable) ] Jeff Starr is a professional developer, designer, author, editor, publisher, and teacher with over 20 years working online, and over 15 years working with WordPress. His books include Digging into WordPress, The Tao of WordPress, .htaccess made easy, and WordPress Themes In Depth.

In addition to books, Jeff writes tutorials on WordPress, web development, security, and much more at Perishable Press, DigWP.com, and WP Mix. He runs his own business at Monzilla Media, served for two years as WordPress Editor for Smashing Magazine, and authors video tutorials at LinkedIn.com.

Over the years, Jeff has developed hundreds of WordPress-powered websites, themes, and plugins. You can check out his growing collection of free WordPress plugins at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, and purchase one of his premium WordPress plugins at Plugin Planet.

Offline, Jeff is enjoys spending time with friends and family, hanging out and having fun. In his free time, he likes watching movies, listening to music, and being creative. Of course, hearty snacks followed by exquisite naps play an important role in Jeff’s weekly routine.

About the site..

[ Perishable Press ] Perishable Press features articles and tutorials on many aspects of web development, and is very much a work in progress. It is where I write tutorials, post discoveries, and share solutions. Perishable Press has been online since 2005 and continues to evolve in terms of content, structure, design, and focus. As I learn, grow, and change, so does the site.

Under the hood, Perishable Press strives toward web standards, usability, accessibility, and privacy. I like code that is clean, minimal, and correct. The site is hosted at Media Temple on a (dv) server running Linux, Apache, and Nginx. It is built with WordPress, PHP, MySQL, HTML, XML, JavaScript, and lots of delicious CSS.

Perishable Press provides high-quality, in-depth articles on web design and development, graphic design, social media, blogging, software, and more. Learn how to use WordPress, PHP, SQL, XML, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a sprinkle of .htaccess to create beautiful, blazing-fast sites that are usable, accessible, and secure.

On the surface, Perishable Press delivers high-quality articles focusing on web development, digital design, creativity, and everything in between. Site content includes random notes, code snippets, in-depth tutorials, product reviews, news and more. Basically anything that I find suitable for sharing with my audience. Sometimes I ramble about personal topics, but most of the time I write about web development, SEO, site security and performance.

The primary thrust of the site focuses on the geekier side of web design and development, with successive thrusts covering everything from digital photography and graphic design to multimedia production and creative writing. I like to imagine a niche where “Modern Creative Media” represents the dynamic intersection between creativity and technology.

Thanks for dropping in to check it out. Feel free to dig around and explore.. Currently, the site features around 800 articles and 12,000 comments, so definitely lots to check out. As they say, “there’s gold in them thar hills!”

Favorite Things

[ Headless Astronaut ] My favorite things web-related include clean, sophisticated sites; unobtrusive, gracefully degrading implementations; progressively enhanced designs; well-formatted, semantical code; strict standards compliance; separation of structure, presentation, and behavior; focus on simplicity, usability, accessibility; optimized performance; data privacy and of course bulletproof security.

I am also especially fond of WordPress, which powers the site and is continually modified and tweaked to suit my vigorously minimalist development strategy. And I have a passion for teaching others how to develop fast, secure sites and succeed on the Web. Helping people achieve their goals and realize independence is a huge source of inspiration.

Elsewhere, I continue sharpening my illustrative and graphic design skills. I enjoy image manipulation, vector art, iconography, and typography. I love to sketch, draw, and paint, and thoroughly enjoy diving into artistic realms, flowing with creative currents, and thinking critically about relevant topics. Beyond those things, I am also into digital audio mixing, video editing, digital photography, and flying drones. As they say: “It’s all good.”

Current Projects

In general, I like to keep multiple projects going at once. Here is a list of my current online projects:

Perishable Press: Perishable Press serves to define and highlight ideas, consolidate and integrate projects, and organize and express the myriad happenings unfolding throughout my vast creative empire. You are here.
Perishable Press Books: I write books on web development and sell them at Perishable Press Books. There you can find sweet deals on Digging Into WordPress, The Tao of WordPress, WordPress Themes In Depth, and .htaccess made easy. More books are on the way, hopefully later this year. To learn more about the project, check out my post on Building the Perishable Press Bookstore.
Plugin Planet: In addition to my growing collection of free WordPress plugins, I also develop and maintain a small collection of premium WordPress plugins at my site, Plugin Planet. There you will find Pro versions of my plugins, BBQ, Blackhole for Bad Bots, and my latest security plugin, Banhammer.
Digging Into WordPress: Co-author Chris Coyier and I help you get the most out of WordPress with our book, Digging Into WordPress, and its official companion site, DigWP.com. This project began late 2008 and has helped many people take their WordPress skills to the next level. And it’s a lot of fun too ;)
.htaccess made easy: Exclusive book (and website) covering everything you need to know about .htaccess. Written in clear, concise language with hundreds of awesome techniques and practical examples. Tighten site security. Boost performance. Fine-tune traffic and maximize SEO.
Monzilla Media: Established in 2007, MonzillaMedia.com is the official website for my web-development business. There, I offer services such as web design and development, improving site security, optimizing traffic for search engines, and everything in between. From small sites to multi-million dollar projects, Monzilla Media strives to develop high-quality web and new media solutions.
WP-Mix: Launched in December of 2012, WP-Mix is a flow of high-quality code, snippets, and tutorials to help with WordPress development and web design in general. The site itself is designed with xy.css, so it’s responsive and sticks to a virtual CSS matrix (vertical & horizontal grid). WP-Mix is one of my favorite projects.
shapeSpace: shapeSpace is my own starter theme template. I’ve been using shapeSpace for several years now, carefully refining and improving the template along with my growing skills and experience. shapeSpace is used to build WP themes for Perishable Press, Plugin Planet, Digging Into WordPress, and most of my other WordPress-powered sites.

Thank you..

For those of you who subscribe to the official Perishable Press RSS Feed and Email Newsletter, I would like to thank you very much. Knowing that you are reading is truly inspiring and encouraging. If you have not yet subscribed, I would of course be honored if you would choose to do so. Either way, thank you for spending a few moments here at Perishable Press! :)