HTAccess Password-Protection Tricks
Recently a reader asked about how to password-protect a directory for every specified IP while allowing open access to everyone else. In my article, Stupid htaccess Tricks, I show how to password-protect a directory for every IP except the one specified, but not for the reverse case. In this article, I will demonstrate this technique along with a wide variety of other useful password-protection tricks, including a few from my Stupid htaccess Tricks article. Before getting into the juicy stuff, […] Continue reading »
CSS Hacks for Different Versions of Firefox
In a perfect world, I don’t use CSS hacks, and certainly don’t recommend them. In the unpredictable, chaos of the real world, however, there are many situations where applying styles to particular browsers is indeed the optimal solution. Most of the time, I am targeting or filtering Internet Explorer (because it is so incredibly awesome), but occasionally I need to tweak something in a modern browser like Firefox, Safari, or Opera. In this article, we’ll look at CSS hacks targeting […] Continue reading »
Dynamic Link Insertion via Unobtrusive External JavaScript
In my recent guest post at The Nexus, I discuss Google’s new nofollow policy and suggest several ways to deal with it. In that article, I explain how Google allegedly has changed the way it deals with nofollow links. Instead of transferring leftover nofollow juice to remaining dofollow links as they always have, Google now pours all that wonderful nofollow juice right down the drain. This shift in policy comes as a terrible surprise to many webmasters and SEO gurus, […] Continue reading »
Dealing with Google’s New Nofollow Policy
Anyone plugged into the Web these days has heard about how Google has supposedly changed the way it deals with nofollow attributes. According to a number of speculative reports, Google will no longer apply unused nofollow PageRank to other links on the page. So, let’s say that you have some sites that have been PageRank “sculpted” by way of strategically applied nofollow tags. For example, you may have nofollowed all of your comment, footer, or sidebar links. Ever since Google […] Continue reading »
Block Multiple IP Addresses with PHP
Let’s face it. There’s just as much scum on the Internet as there is out there in the “real world.” Maybe even more, who knows. From scammers and spammers to scrapers and crackers, the Web is just crawling with all sorts of pathetic scumbags. As predictably random as much of the malicious activity happens to be, it is virtually guaranteed that you will be hounded by at least a few persistent IP addresses that, for whatever reason, have latched on […] Continue reading »
Secure Visitor Posting for WordPress
Normally, when visitors post a comment to your site, specific types of client data are associated with the request. Commonly, a client will provide a user agent, a referrer, and a host header. When any of these variables is absent, there is good reason to suspect foul play. For example, virtually all browsers provide some sort of user-agent name to identify themselves. Conversely, malicious scripts directly posting spam and other payloads to your site frequently operate without specifying a user […] Continue reading »
9 Ways to Set Dynamic Body IDs via PHP and WordPress
When designing sites, it is often useful to identify different pages by adding an ID attribute to the <body></body> element. Commonly, the name of the page is used as the attribute value, for example: <body id="about"></body> In this case, “about” would be the body ID for the “About” page, which would be named something like “about.php”. Likewise, other pages would have unique IDs as well, for example: <body id="archive"> </body><body id="contact"> </body><body id="subscribe"> </body><body id="portfolio"></body> ..again, with each ID associated […] Continue reading »
HTAccess Spring Cleaning 2009
Just like last year, this Spring I have been taking some time to do some general maintenance here at Perishable Press. This includes everything from fixing broken links and resolving errors to optimizing scripts and eliminating unnecessary plugins. I’ll admit, this type of work is often quite dull, however I always enjoy the process of cleaning up my HTAccess files. In this post, I share some of the changes made to my HTAccess files and explain the reasoning behind each […] Continue reading »
SEO Experiment: Let Google Sort it Out
One way to prevent Google from crawling certain pages is to use <meta /> elements in the <head></head> section of your web documents. For example, if I want to prevent Google from indexing and archiving a certain page, I would add the following code to the head of my document: Continue reading »
Important Security Fix for WordPress
The other day, my server crashed and Perishable Press was unable to connect to the MySQL database. Normally, when WordPress encounters a database error, it delivers a specific error message similar to the following: Continue reading »
Best Practices for Error Monitoring
Given my propensity to discuss matters involving error log data (e.g., monitoring malicious behavior, setting up error logs, and creating extensive blacklists), I am often asked about the best way to go about monitoring 404 and other types of server errors. While I consider myself to be a novice in this arena (there are far brighter people with much greater experience), I do spend a lot of time digging through log entries and analyzing data. So, when asked recently about […] Continue reading »
4G Series: The Ultimate Referrer Blacklist, Featuring Over 8000 Banned Referrers
You have seen user-agent blacklists, IP blacklists, 4G Blacklists, and everything in between. Now, in this article, for your sheer and utter amusement, I present a collection of over 8000 blacklisted referrers. Shortcut: skip the article and jump to Disclaimer and Download » Referrer Spam Sucks For the uninitiated, in teh language of teh Web, a referrer is the online resource from whence a visitor happened to arrive at your site. For example, if Johnny the Wonder Parrot was visiting the […] Continue reading »
WordPress Tip: Valid, SEO-Friendly Email Permalink Buttons
In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template: <a href="mailto:?subject=Fresh%20Linkage%20@%20Perishable%20Press&body=Check%20out%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>%20from%20Perishable%20Press" title="Send a link to this post via email" rel="nofollow">Share […] Continue reading »
Getting Naked on My Birthday
In celebration of CSS Naked Day, Perishable Press has disabled it’s CSS stylesheet for today, April 9th, 2009 (which also happens to be my 37th birthday)! What a great way to celebrate the occasion. What are you waiting for? Go get naked!! ;) Continue reading »
Perishable Press Featured at CSS Perk!
Yet another fine reason to celebrate the current Quintessential theme design here at Perishable Press is graciously provided by the fine folks at CSS Perk. CSS Perk features a growing collection of awesomely designed websites. It’s always a great source of inspiration and ideas for new design projects. Update: cssperk.com is no longer with us, the site went offline 2013/06/24. Still cool getting featured though. Seeing my current theme design showcased at CSS Perk is very inspiring, and a super-cool […] Continue reading »
4G Series: The Ultimate User-Agent Blacklist, Featuring Over 1200 Bad Bots
As discussed in my recent article, Eight Ways to Blacklist with Apache’s mod_rewrite, one method of stopping spammers, scrapers, email harvesters, and malicious bots is to blacklist their associated user agents. Apache enables us to target bad user agents by testing the user-agent string against a predefined blacklist of unwanted visitors. Any bot identifying itself as one of the blacklisted agents is immediately and quietly denied access. While this certainly isn’t the most effective method of securing your site against […] Continue reading »
