How to Verify the Four Major Search Engines
Keeping track of your access and error logs is a critical component of any serious security strategy. Many times, you will see a recorded entry that looks legitimate, such that it may easily be dismissed as genuine Google fare, only to discover upon closer investigation a fraudulent agent. There are many such cloaked or disguised agents crawling around these days, mimicking various search engines to hide beneath the radar. So it’s always a good idea to implement a procedure for […] Continue reading »
You Know Nothing
One of my favorite things to do involves reading and listening to the opinions of others. This is great for me, because people and their opinions are everywhere. I derive pleasure from considering alternate points of view and even enjoy arguing against my own ideas. Whenever I think that I honestly know something, I try questioning it until I prove myself wrong or decide to try again later. It usually doesn’t take very long to realize that I don’t know […] Continue reading »
Hello, I Hate You.
I have been fairly nervous about starting mindfeed.org. Like you, I fear ridicule, rejection, and criticism. Although I don’t understand exactly why, I find myself differentiating between the criticism of others and the criticism of myself. Perhaps the reason involves the perceived intention of the criticism. I know that when I criticize myself, it is done with the purpose of improving or bettering some aspect of myself. However, improving myself is not the result of every personal criticism. During certain […] Continue reading »
WordPress Spam Battle: 3 Seconds that will Save You Hours of Time
In the hellish battle against spam, many WordPress users have adopted a highly effective trinity of anti-spam plugins: Akismet Bad Behavior Spam Karma This effective triage of free WordPress plugins has served many a WP-blogger well, eliminating virtually 99% of all automated comment-related spam. When spam first became a problem for me, I installed this triple-threat arsenal of anti-spam plugins and immediately enjoyed the results. Although Spam Karma seemed a little invasive and resource-intensive, too much protection seemed far better […] Continue reading »
Black Market Diaper Spam
Insanity reigns in the blogosphere! Check out this sweet little spam comment that found its way to my moderation queue.. Cloth Hello to all, its my new pages about cloth cloth diaper You can buy here 24\7. Yes indeed, “Cloth diaper”!! Come on now, is the competition really that fierce in the cloth diaper industry that companies must turn to the slimy spam cartel for scummy comment links? “its my new pages about cloth” — WTF?!!! Dude! I can’t wait […] Continue reading »
What are the Different Layers of the Blogosphere?
By now, everyone is familiar with the whole concept of the “blogosphere.” According to common definition, the blogosphere represents the virtual realm in which all blogs exist in an interconnected community of online social networking activity. Such blogospheric activity includes writing, posting and commenting, and involves many different types of blogs and bloggers. As with the atmosphere, the blogosphere consists of several, well-defined layers. Let’s investigate this hypothetical representational phenomenon.. Continue reading »
Fixing Mint after Switching Servers
After switching Perishable Press to its current home at A Small Orange, I began noticing an unusual problem with referrer data displayed in Mint. Specifically, the first item recorded in the XXX Strong Mint data panel — for both “Most Recent” and “Repeat” views — displayed several thousand hits for various site resources, all reporting the following IP address: Continue reading »
Life, Twinkies, Zombies and Death
I have to admit, I am completely intrigued with human ideas, thought, and opinion. My favorite part of blog posts are the comments, and the best part of the newspaper is the opinion page. When talking with people, I am generally the one doing most of listening. In fact, I find that the more I listen, the more people are willing to talk. Often, they will talk with apparent and utter disregard for anything that I may have to add […] Continue reading »
Everything is Relative
People love to argue. Often, to resolve conflicting opinions, people will “agree to disagree,” saying something like, “it’s all relative.” The idea behind this common statement is that everyone believes in their own version of the truth, which may or may not happen to prove true for other people. Saying that “it’s all relative” also implies that every version of the truth is equally valid. Unfortunately, important discussions are often abandoned to the familiar tune of universal relativism. Continue reading »
htaccess Combo Pack: WordPress Permalinks and non-www Redirect
WordPress users employing permalinks via htaccess to optimize their dynamic URLs transform complicated-looking links such as: http://example.com/blog/index.php?page=33 ..into search-engine friendly links such as: http://example.com/blog/post-title/ Every rewritten URL relies on a common set of htaccess rules to transform the links. The htaccess rules for all WordPress permalinks look like this for root WP installations: # BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </ifmodule> # END WordPress ..and like this for […] Continue reading »
88Teeth Site Redesign
Anatomical Abstraction Longtime friend and fellow-DLa member ThaneC recently has updated his personal slash portfolio site, eightyeightteeth.com. With the help of Monzilla Media, ThaneC’s site has been completely redesigned and reorganized, featuring easy navigation and generous presentation of core content. Every page is overflowing with creative juice — thumbnail galleries of artistic works, digital photos, and custom wallpapers are a pleasure to browse. Full-size versions of each creative piece “pop-up” upon command. ThaneC’s unpretentious wit and artistic sincerity furnish each […] Continue reading »
Notes and Tips for Better Social Bookmarking
For those of you still hiding your bookmarks within the dark confines of your browser’s “favorites” menu, may I suggest stepping into the “here and now” with a fresh new approach: social bookmarking. Hopefully, most of my readers are already familiar with the many wonders of managing and sharing your bookmarks online, but for those who may still be questioning the whole idea, allow me to expound briefly on several of the immediate benefits: Universal access to your bookmarked sites […] Continue reading »
Position Absolute Horizontal and Vertical Center via CSS
Recently, a reader named Max encountered some scrolling issues while implementing our absolutely centered layout technique. Of course, by “absolutely centered” we are referring to content that remains positioned dead-center regardless of how the browser is resized. After noticing the scrollbar deficiency, Max kindly dropped a comment to explain the issue: the div solution works well, only one problem maybe somebody can help: if you make the browser window smaller then the div is -> the scrollbar doenst fit right […] Continue reading »
Five-Step Feed-Portfolio Makeover
Recently, I found myself drowning in an ocean of RSS feeds. Even after switching to Google Reader, which definitely speeds up the process of plowing through posts, I was wasting too much time consuming subscribed content. Thus, in an effort to find balance between saving time and staying current, I executed the following five-step feed portfolio makeover: Drop lame feeds. Previously, I had subscribed to a number of feeds simply because they were recommended or mentioned in an article somewhere. […] Continue reading »
Much ado about nofollow: The Perishable Press Dofollow Series
Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Oh great, not another article about WordPress nofollow!!” Well, if that sounds like you, I have good news! This is the last post (at least for awhile, anyway) concerning all things nofollow, dofollow, and even no-nofollow, for that matter. In fact, this post isn’t even about nofollow! It’s simply a summary of the articles I have written involving nofollow-related topics. The articles fit together so well, one might suppose they were planned deliberately as […] Continue reading »
Hacking WordPress: The Ultimate Nofollow Blacklist
Several days ago, I posted an article explaining how to hack your own WordPress nofollow blacklist. Immediately thereafter, I published an elaborate article focusing on automatic methods of nofollow blacklisting via WordPress plugins. In this article, I expand on the original blacklist hack by incorporating functional differentiation between commentator links, trackbacks, and pingbacks. If anything, think of this as an exercise in hacking WordPress, rewarding in and of itself, if not otherwise entirely impractical. Of course, whenever possible, you should […] Continue reading »
