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Web Dev + WordPress + Security

minimalist Theme

[ minimalist Theme ]

The minimalist theme is crisp and clean. Featuring a three-column satellite menu-page to reduce clutter and streamline usability, the minimalist theme is designed to present site content with sophistication and elegance. The minimalist theme is XHTML 1.1 strict, employs nearly valid CSS (ha!), and features browser-safe colors and universal fonts all delivered via concise, two-column liquid layout. Mindfully detailed and carefully prepared, the minimalist theme provides plenty of room for customization and expansion. One of my favorite theme designs. Continue reading »

Stop Bitacle from Stealing Content

[ Stop bitacle.org ]

If you have yet to encounter the content-scraping site, bitacle.org, consider yourself lucky. The scum-sucking worm-holes at bitacle.org are well-known for literally, blatantly, and piggishly stealing blog content and using it for financial gains through advertising. While I am not here to discuss the legal, philosophical, or technical ramifications of illegal bitacle behavior, I am here to provide a few critical tools that will help stop bitacle from stealing your content. Continue reading »

Theme Edits for IE7

This post is a working repository of code edits and other changes made to Perishable Press themes in order for them to function properly in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). If supporting older versions of IE is your thang. Continue reading »

Extreme Makeover for Gravatars in WordPress

Gravatars have become a popular way of adding spice to the “comments” page of many WordPress-powered sites. So popular, in fact, that the gravatar server is often overloaded, bogged down with millions of gravatar requests every second. This immense server load effects user pages everywhere, resulting in slow loading times, unresolved server requests, and missing gravatars. Such broken presentations appear unprofessional, tarnish reputations, and may provoke confusion. This article provides essential solutions for an extreme gravatar makeover.. Continue reading »

One Link to Open Them All

Welcome to Perishable Press! This article explains several methods for opening multiple frames with a single link. For more excellent HTML information, check out the HTML category archive. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to Perishable Press for a periodic dose of online enlightenment ;) Continue reading »

Roll Your Own SEO Log

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the business of every serious webmaster. The process of optimizing a website for the search engines involves much more than properly constructed document headers and anchor tags. Websites are like trees: their roots are the growing collection of content presented through the branching universe of the World Wide Web. Or something. The point is that optimizing a website requires nurturing the site itself while also ensuring proper exposure to the requisite elements of the internet. Continue reading »

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) Formats

There are currently three formats for expressing date/time in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). All examples represent the date, July 04, 2050. The time for all three formats is expressed as hour:minutes:seconds. Continue reading »

SEO 101: Keyword Development and Deployment

Keywords play a vital role in search engine optimization (SEO), and — if used properly — have the potential to increase the flow of traffic to your site. It is beneficial to maintain an active list of keywords for each of your websites. Each list should be a continually evolving set of important, relevant keywords. The idea here is to develop a consistent practice of actively seeking better keywords, thereby producing your very own customized keyword library. Continue reading »

Optimize Convoluted Code via JavaScript

Search engines loathe crawling through convoluted lines of code. Oceans of complex JavaScript scare away the priceless indexing and archiving efforts of most major search engines, which will generally abort a crawl upon encountering such mess. The good news is that search engines actually do not deploy JavaScript, so it is possible to use JavaScript to hide those miles of messy code by using the fundamental document.write function. Continue reading »

Execute External WordPress Functions

To execute WordPress functions in an external directory (i.e., outside of the WordPress install directory), it is necessary to include a call to wp-blog-header.php at the top of the external file. Continue reading »

Stupid htaccess Tricks Redux

One of our most popular posts, Stupid htaccess Tricks, has been completely rewritten and now includes almost twice as many stupid htaccess tricks. Plus, we have added a library of regex character definitions, more information for many of the directives, and several handy references. But wait, there’s more — we even threw in a “quick-jump” Table of Contents and a complete set of “up” links [ ^ ] for easy navigation. Utterly amazing! Continue reading »

A Complete CSS Template File

To help maintain consistency when developing new CSS-styled websites, we have created a complete CSS template file. The file contains every HTML/XHTML tag known to man. This includes tags such as BASEFONT and CENTER, which have been deprecated; tags such as COMMENT and MARQUEE, which are exclusive to Internet Explorer; tags such as SPACER and SERVER, which are exclusive to Netscape Navigator; and even tags such as !DOCTYPE and BASE, which are included merely for the sake of completeness. The […] Continue reading »

Perishable Press Redesign

[ WP Theme: Jupiter! ]

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 »

Back up that Database with phpMyAdmin

Optimal Database Export Options

Backing up your database as often as possible is essential. For WordPress, as well as for other applications, plugins and other scripts that help automate the task are easily obtainable. However, for several reasons, it is a good idea to understand the process of manually creating a backup copy of your database. This quick tutorial should help cement the process into a solid reference. We are assuming that you have an SQL database and have access via phpMyAdmin. Continue reading »

Website Attack Recovery

Recently, every website on our primary server was simultaneously attacked. The offending party indiscriminately replaced the contents of every index file, regardless of its extension or location, with a few vulgar lines of code, which indicated intention, identity, and influence. Apparently, the attack occurred via Germany, through a server at the University of Hamburg (uni-hamburg.de). This relatively minor attack resulted in several hours of valuable online education. In this article, it is our intention to share experience with website attack […] Continue reading »

Dead Letter Art Website Update

A new Dead Letter Art website is in the works and coming soon. The new site enhances previous content with dynamic features and improved organization. The new site has also been updated to include more archived content, including ancient issues and special projects. Additionally, some keen Ajax functionality kicks the “fun” up a notch. Anticipated release date: September 1, 2006. Check out the old, sickly green website here. 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 »
WP Themes In Depth: Build and sell awesome WordPress themes.
Thoughts
I live right next door to the absolute loudest car in town. And the owner loves to drive it.
8G Firewall now out of beta testing, ready for use on production sites.
It's all about that ad revenue baby.
Note to self: encrypting 500 GB of data on my iMac takes around 8 hours.
Getting back into things after a bit of a break. Currently 7° F outside. Chillz.
2024 is going to make 2020 look like a vacation. Prepare accordingly.
First snow of the year :)
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