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272 posts related to: Stop User Enumeration in WordPress

BBQ Firewall – Count Blocked Requests

BBQ Firewall

BBQ Firewall is built to be powerful, lightweight, fast and flexible. It’s code base is kept super lean, leaving extra functionality out of core while supporting new features via simple addons. For example, this tutorial shows how to use an addon to display the total number of blocked HTTP requests on the plugin settings page. This can help you get a basic idea of the plugin’s effectiveness. Continue reading »

Enable Logging for nG Firewall

This tutorial is for users of my nG Firewall, version 8G or better. It explains how to enable logging for all blocked requests. This is useful for testing, debugging, and keeping an eye on things. Takes only a few minutes to set up, and of course it’s all open source and 100% free for everyone :) Continue reading »

8G Firewall (Beta)

8G Firewall (Beta)

The 8th generation of nG Firewall now is available for testing. We’ve got a great team of beta testers already checking things out. Everything going smoothly so far, now rolling out public style here at Perishable Press. To help test the beta version of 8G, read through this post and grab a download. 8G is open source and 100% free for everyone. A huge thank you to all beta testers :) Continue reading »

About nG Firewall

The nG Firewall is a carefully crafted set of security rules for Apache and Nginx servers. nG may be applied via your site’s public root .htaccess file, or added via server configuration file. Once added, 8G provides powerful server-level protection against a wide range of malicious requests, bad bots, automated attacks, spam, and many other types of threats and nonsense. It’s a lightweight yet super strong firewall that improves site security and peace of mind. Continue reading »

Domain-Based, Site Specific 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 domain-based 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 »

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 »

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

Bad robots

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 Icon

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 Icon

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 »

Roll Your Own Simple Password Manager on macOS

Password Manager

I’ve tried 1Password and Dashlane, and several other popular password managers for both Mac and PC. It always seems to be the same thing: things start off great and then go downhill from there. For example, I was loving 1Password, and then it locked me out of my password file/account. Likewise for a couple of years Dashlane was great, but then they started making drastic changes like moving from standalone app to browser extension Web-based UI. The confusion involved with […] Continue reading »

Apache Redirect Range of IP Addresses (IPv4 and IPv6)

There are numerous ways to redirect requests using Apache’s mod_rewrite and mod_alias. This concise, friendly tutorial explains different ways to redirect a range of IP addresses, either IPv4 or IPv6. Continue reading »

Disable Apache mod_rewrite Rules in any Subdirectory

Let’s say you have some .htaccess rewrite rules in place using Apache’s mod_rewrite. By default if the rewrite rules are located in the root directory, they will be applied to every subdirectory, as expected. But what if you need to disable the rewrite rules so that they do not affect some specific sub-directory or sub-folder? This super quick tutorial shows the easiest way to do it. Continue reading »

Fix Weird Hover Border in WordPress 5.7 Admin Menu

Weird hover border on WP menu links

I’ve been testing the beta for WordPress 5.7. So far no complaints but there is one weird thing it looks like they are adding, some weird 4-pixel width border that displays when you hover over any item(s) on the main WordPress menu. It’s even got a transition animation to make it feel extra wonky. Here is a screenshot for those who have not yet had the pleasure of experiencing the new stylez (look on the left-hand side of the menu, […] Continue reading »

7G Firewall for Nginx

7G Nginx

After several months of development, the official Nginx version of the 7G Firewall is out of beta and ready for public use. If you are not familiar with 7G Firewall, check out the documentation for the Apache/.htaccess version. The Nginx version of the 7G Firewall works the exact same way, so I won’t bother repeating everything here. The only difference is the implementation, how to set it up on an Nginx server, which is explained in this post. Continue reading »

Welcome
Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience. Here you will find posts about web development, WordPress, security, and more »
Blackhole Pro: Trap bad bots in a virtual black hole.
Thoughts
Plugin updates! All of our free and pro plugins ready for WordPress 6.2.
Daylight savings is a complete waste of time and needs to be eliminated.
Got a couple of snow days here in mid-March. Fortunately it's not sticking.
I handle all email in real time as it comes in, perpetually clear inbox for years now.
Added some nice features to Wutsearch search engine launchpad. Now 21 engines!
.wp TLD plz :)
Nice collection of free SEO APIs and user-agent lookups for Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, YandexBot, and more.
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