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 »
My free WordPress plugin, Disable WP REST API, disables the REST API for all users who are not logged in to WordPress. So if you’re using a plugin such as Contact Form 7 that requires the REST API, it’s not going to work if Disable WP REST API is active on site. But there is a way to make it work. This quick tutorial explains how to set it up in two steps. Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Recently WordPress sites have been getting hammered with random-string comment spam. The attackers are clever, using random text strings for every vector except the payload, which usually is the URL used for the comment’s Name link. But for these weird comment spams, the apparent payload is the email address. It’s the only part of the comment that’s not made up of random gibberish. Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
I have thought a lot about making an nG WordPress plugin. The problem is that writing to .htaccess via PHP/plugin is risky with lots of ways to fail and make users confused and angry. And nobody wants that, in fact just the opposite: my plugins strive to give users the most awesome experience possible. Continue reading »
Simple Download Counter is a free WordPress plugin that does exactly what it says: counts the number of times your files are downloaded. SDC is designed for maximum ease of use. The goal is a clean, lightweight “set it and forget it” solution for keeping track of downloads. Simply add your files via the plugin settings and display download links via shortcodes. Simple Download Counter does the rest. Continue reading »
New WordPress plugin! Simple Login Notification does one thing and does it well: sends an email alert whenever an admin-level user logs in to your site. I use this plugin on all of my sites to keep an eye on any unauthorized activity. Not that I’m expecting any, but if it does happen I definitely want to know about it. The plugin size is only 4 KB (zipped) with virtually zero impact on performance or anything else. Win win win, […] Continue reading »
I’ve been developing WordPress chat plugins for over 10 years, and have received tons of great user feedback for the free version of Simple Ajax Chat (SAC). So many ideas and ways to improve the plugin that it just made sense to bring it all together and build a new “pro” version. So after several months of intense plugin development, I am excited to launch my latest WordPress plugin, SAC Pro. SAC Pro is completely rewritten from the ground up, […] Continue reading »
I’m excited to launch my latest web-dev book, Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress. I got the idea for this book way back when I was first learning how to build dynamic websites. I thought it would be useful to bring together all of the best SQL snippets in sort of a “spellbook” or “cookbook”. After all, SQL queries can seem like magic to the uninitiated. By entering concise, well-crafted commands, SQL enables anyone to interact with any relational database. It’s […] Continue reading »