Blacklist Candidate Number 2008-01-02
Welcome to the Perishable Press “Blacklist Candidate” series! In this first post, we begin a new tradition of exposing, humiliating and banishing spammers, crackers and other worthless scumbags.. Every Wednesday, I take a little time to investigate my 404 error logs. In addition to spam, crack attacks, and other deliberate mischief, the 404 logs for Perishable Press contain errors due to missing resources, mistyped URLs, and the occasional bizarre or even suspicious behavior of the search-engine robots. Whenever possible, I […] Continue reading »
Optimize WordPress: Pure Code Alternatives for 7 Unnecessary Plugins
In this article, my goal is to help you optimize WordPress by replacing a few common plugins with their correspondingly effective code equivalents. As we all know, WordPress can be a very resource-hungry piece of software, especially when running a million extraneous plugins. Often, many common plugins are designed to perform relatively simple tasks, such as redirect a feed, display a random image, query the database, etc. For those of us comfortable with editing PHP and htaccess code, there is […] Continue reading »
How to Enable PHP Error Logging via htaccess
In this brief tutorial, I will show Apache users how to suppress PHP errors from visitors and enable PHP error logging via htaccess. Tracking your site’s PHP errors is an excellent way to manage and troubleshoot unexpected issues related to plugins and themes. Even better, monitoring PHP errors behind the scenes via private log is far better than trying to catch them as they appear at random visits. Thanks to the magical powers of htaccess, there is an easy way […] Continue reading »
Yahoo! Slurp in My Blackhole (Yet Again)
Yup, ‘ol Slurp is at it again, flagrantly disobeying specific robots.txt rules forbidding access to my bad-bot trap, lovingly dubbed the “blackhole.” As many readers know, this is not the first time Yahoo has been caught behaving badly. This time, Yahoo was caught trespassing five different times via three different IPs over the course of four different days. Here is the data recorded in my site’s blackhole log (I know, that sounds terrible): Continue reading »
Quick JavaScript Tip: Auto-Highlight Form Inputs and Textareas
I realize that probably everybody already knows this elementary and absolutely dead-simple JavaScript tip, but I was surfing around the other day and encountered a page that made great use of some auto-highlighted textarea content. The idea is simple, include a snippet of JavaScript to enable users to automatically highlight/select upon focus any chunk of text located within a form input or textarea element. Continue reading »
A Dramatic Week Here at Perishable Press..
..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights.. Continue reading »
Site News: Bad Behavior Spasm, Switching to New VPS Server..
Hello! As many of you already know, the popular WordPress anti-spam plugin, Bad Behavior, caused some problems yesterday, and as a result many bloggers and users were locked out of their favorite sites, including this one. As for now, the problem seems to be fixed, however, the experience of being locked out of my own site has left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth. Needless to say, I will be reconsidering the continued use of Bad Behavior as a […] Continue reading »
5 Easy Ways to Syntax Highlight PHP Code
A great to way to share your PHP code with visitors is to display it directly in the browser with automatically generated syntax highlighting. Here is a screenshot showing an example of syntax-highlighted PHP code: Displaying your PHP scripts in syntax-highlighted form is an excellent way to share source code details directly with your readers. Rather than zipping the script and requiring users to download, unzip, and open the file in an editor, displaying your code directly saves you and […] Continue reading »
Protect Your Site Against UserCash and Other Scumbags
In this brief article I explain the atrocity that is UserCash and then provide the JavaScript needed to protect your site. Continue reading »
How to Add Meta Noindex to Your Feeds
Want to make sure that your feeds are not indexed by Google and other compliant search engines? Add the following code to the channel element of your XML-based (RSS, etc.) feeds: <xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex"></xhtml:meta> Here is an example of how I use this tag for Perishable Press feeds (vertical spacing added for emphasis): Continue reading »
Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience.
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