Pardon my dust! I am in the process of switching over to the site’s new design. Please report anything weird, otherwise please pardon my dust as the site settles in with its new theme :) Will post a full report soon! Continue reading »
Just a note that PerishablePress.com will be migrating to its new home at Media Temple. Thanks for your patience as the DNS propagates. If you encounter anything seriously weird, like unexpected errors or anything, please comment on this post or send an email. As always, thank you for your help. Okay – here goes nothin’! Continue reading »
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, HTAccess, JavaScript, (X)HTML, and CSS to create beautiful sites that are usable, accessible, and secure. Good Day Sunshine Perishable Press is the virtual playground of Jeff Starr — visionary, founder and lead developer of Monzilla Media, a small web and graphic design company located in the lush desert oasis of Moses Lake, Washington. Perishable […] Continue reading »
After announcing my intention to redesign Perishable Press, I received some great feedback addressing everything from site architecture and navigation to appearance and usability. As the conversations continue, I want to spend some time thinking about usability, navigation, columns and sidebars. The current minimalist design features a single column layout with no sidebars. Content is located prominently front and center, with all navigational links appearing in either the oversized “footer” area or at the end of each individual post. As […] Continue reading »
I want to redesign Perishable Press. The current design was released around a year ago, and has received numerous compliments and criticisms. Compliments tend to focus on the theme’s minimalist sensibilities, while criticism is generally directed at the design’s poor usability. Personally, I find the “grey-on-black” color scheme to be very inspiring. Others, however, have difficulties reading the content, and that’s not good. Continue reading »
One of the year-end maintenance rituals that I have decided to adopt involves sharing a few annual site statistics for Perishable Press. Over the course of the previous year, Perishable Press has gone through many changes, including switching servers multiple times, eliminating nofollow attributes from comments, and even a complete site overhaul and restructuring. Despite the chaos surrounding such events, traffic levels have continued to increase, bounce rates have steadily decreased, and the number of feed subscribers continues to grow. […] Continue reading »
Just when I thought I had finally solved my web-hosting woes by transferring to a virtual private server, I am slapped in the face by the cold realities of server memory limitations. Apparently, WordPress-powered sites are extremely resource-intensive, requiring insane amounts of random access memory (RAM), something which does not concern those of us working from shared hosting accounts. On a shared server, system resources are shared among the various accounts that reside on a particular server. When one of […] Continue reading »
When I first began Perishable Press, I intended the site to focus primarily on the creative side of web and graphic design. However, I also wanted to share equally my ideas and experiences involving music, video, and other multimedia avenues of creative expression. Further, because I enjoy writing, and find myself frequently focusing on art, inspiration, and artistic expression, the initial plan encompassed a perpetual exploration and presentation of these topics here at Perishable Press. Two years later, the original […] Continue reading »
This post is hereby dedicated to the official logging of all unresolved and/or unexplained errors encountered during development or implementation of various plugins, extensions, themes, scripts, and/or anything else that results in bizarre and mysterious errors, bugs, or other anomalies. Further, we will also post any potential solutions, fixes, workarounds, or explanations for any errors logged in this post. This information is provided for reference purposes only — please share any related information you may have concerning any of the […] Continue reading »
Perishable Press is now running WordPress 2.0.5. Everything went very well as we upgraded directly from version 2.0.2. Please report any errors or unusual/unexpected behavior (concerning this site). Your help is appreciated as we get things updated and running smooth. So thank you in advance for your time :) Continue reading »
Perishable Press recently celebrated its one-year anniversary! Well, okay, so nobody really celebrated anything, but we did take note as our first anniversary both came and went. Yeah, …uh, actually, no one is even quite sure of the actual anniversary date. But we do know it has been a little over one year since we began all of this time-consuming nonsense.. –Whatever!! Continue reading »
If you have question, comment, or concern, and prefer to leave a comment rather than send an email, please drop a comment via the form below. I keep a close eye on all comments left on this post, and will do my best to respond in as soon as possible. Please note that all comments left at this post are open to the public and available for anyone to see. If you would like to contact me privately, you may […] Continue reading »
Perishable Press began as a virtual journey into the digital chaos of the blogosphere. While initially designing the site, we began posting a variety of content, primarily information related to the project itself. During the development process, as the site exploded into a frenzy of ideas, possibilities, and experimentation, we continued to post code examples, useful links, and tons of reference material. Slowly, as the site began to attract visitors, we began to clarify our scope, define our niche, and […] Continue reading »
For many months, visitors to Perishable Press encountered the highly customized Jupiter! theme. Utilizing sIFR, Prototype, Lightbox, and several other bandwidth-heavy scripts, the Jupiter! theme weighs in at well over 400KB/page when saved as an offline copy. The Jupiter! theme also employs every plugin used here at Perishable Press, resulting in even slower performance for broadband users, and utterly painful experiences for those on modem/dial-up. Continue reading »
After a few weeks of utter silence here at Perishable Press, it is time to post some fresh material. We have a few interesting — perhaps useful — articles coming up, including Website Attack Recovery, Lightbox/Tooltips Bug Fix, Even More Server Drama, and even a few posts covering recent events, tips, and other general nonsense. Continue reading »
Earlier this year, we decided to implement the much-hyped, visitor-tracking and website optimization tool called Google Analytics. Google’s free data analytics service offers enterprise-level statistics capabilities and provides “high-end web analytics” and works with or without Google AdWords. Sounds great, however the service currently is available through invitation or “approved” signup. Skeptical that we would ever hear anything, we decided to submit a request anyway. Continue reading »