For those who know, YOURLS makes it super easy to host your own URL shortening service. I use Yourls on several sites and it works great at generating shortlinks for otherwise long and tedious URLs. So they’re easier to share, remember, social media, etc. Yourls is developed by a well-respected developer and is 100% FREE and open source for everyone. It’s a truly great app and highly recommended. Continue reading »
So yesterday I got a new phone and could not log in to my account at WordPress.org. Why? Because I had enabled Two-factor authentication (2FA) on my account as an extra layer of security. I had been completing this 2FA step on my old phone using the Google Authenticator app, which works great. The problem is that I had not yet transferred my Authenticator codes to my new phone. So when I tried to log in to my WordPress.org account, […] Continue reading »
Lately my some of my WordPress-powered sites have been hit with a very specific brand of comment spam, which may be referred to as “darknet market spam”. The spam is simple but persistent. And there’s a LOT of it. Very annoying. Fortunately it is trivial to stop. Here are a few ways to block teh darknet market spam.. Continue reading »
Good news! The 8G Firewall is updated to version 1.4. This latest update resolves numerous false positives and bugs that have been reported since version 1.3, when 8G was taken out of beta and officially launched last year. Continue reading »
I enjoy sharing the pathetic phishing emails that make it past my spam filters. After watching various waves of phishing campaigns come and go over the past 20 years, I have come to accept that it’s just a part of life on the Web. Phishing scams have been happening since the dawn of the Internet, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. About the best you can do is practice safe email handling practices and never open any links or […] Continue reading »
As a full-time web developer and typical human being, I rely on the Internet for a great many things. So when the Internet is not available, my work (and play) comes to a grinding halt. Fortunately my primary ISP is pretty solid, but it still goes down every once in a while. So to maintain my workflow (and general sanity), having a backup Internet service provider is absolutely essential. Here’s one way to do it.. Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
After more than a year of beta testing, 8G Firewall is ready for use on production sites. So you can benefit from the powerful protection provided by the latest evolution of the nG Firewall (aka nG Blacklist). The 8G Firewall offers lightweight, server-level protection against a wide range of malicious requests, bad bots, automated attacks, spam, and many other types of threats and nonsense. 8G is a lightweight (only 17KB) strong firewall that provides site security and peace of mind. […] 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 »
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 »