![[ Building the Hoover Dam, Part 1 ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/building-4g/hoover-dam_01.jpg)
Last year, after much research and discussion, I built a concise, lightweight security strategy for Apache-powered websites. Prior to the development of this strategy, I relied on several extensive blacklists to protect my sites against malicious user agents and IP addresses. Unfortunately, these mega-lists eventually became unmanageable and ineffective. As increasing numbers of attacks hit my server, I began developing new techniques for defending against external threats. This work soon culminated in the release of a “next-generation” blacklist that works […] Continue reading »
In my recent article on blocking proxy servers, I explain how to use HTAccess to deny site access to a wide range of proxy servers. The method works great, but some readers want to know how to allow access for specific proxy servers while denying access to as many other proxies as possible. Fortunately, the solution is as simple as adding a few lines to my original proxy-blocking method. Specifically, we may allow any requests coming from our whitelist of […] Continue reading »
Canonical URLs are important for maintaining consistent linkage, reducing duplicate content issues, and increasing the overall integrity of your site. In addition to cleaning up trailing slashes and removing extraneous index.php and index.html strings, removing the www subdirectory prefix is an excellent way to shorten links and deliver consistent, canonical URLs. Of course, an optimal way of removing (or adding) the www prefix is accomplished via HTAccess canonicalization: Continue reading »
![[ #1 ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/eight-blacklist/01.gif)
With the imminent release of the next series of (4G) blacklist articles here at Perishable Press, now is the perfect time to examine eight of the most commonly employed blacklisting methods achieved with Apache’s incredible rewrite module, mod_rewrite. In addition to facilitating site security, the techniques presented in this article will improve your understanding of the different rewrite methods available with Apache mod_rewrite. Note: I changed the title of this post from “Eight Ways to Blacklist..” to “Eight Ways to […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Abstract Mathematical Diagram ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/temp-redirect.jpg)
In my previous article on temporarily redirecting visitors during site updates, I present numerous PHP and HTAccess methods for handling traffic during site maintenance, updates, and other temporary periods of downtime. Each of the PHP methods presented in the article allow for access from a single IP while redirecting everyone else. In this article, we modify our previous techniques to allow access for multiple IP addresses while temporarily redirecting everyone else to the page of our choice. Plus, while we’re […] Continue reading »
Here’s the scene: you have been noticing a large number of 404 requests coming from a particular domain. You check it out and realize that the domain in question has a number of misdirected links to your site. The links may resemble legitimate URLs, but because of typographical errors, markup errors, or outdated references, they are broken, leading to nowhere on your site and producing a nice 404 error for every request. Ugh. Or, another painful scenario would be a […] Continue reading »
If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use Feedburner to track your feed statistics, this article describes a relatively simple, “roll-your-own” alternative. Instead of redirecting your feed traffic through Feedburner, keep your original feed URLs and place the following code into a file named “feed_stats.php” (or whatever) and upload to your server: Continue reading »
![[ Magnetic Fields ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/custom-fields/custom-fields.jpg)
As we have seen in our previous post, WordPress Custom Fields Part I, custom fields provide an excellent way to add flexible content to your posts and pages. By assigning various types of content to different custom fields, you gain complete control over when, where, and how to display the associated information. For example, sub-headings may be displayed in the sidebar, footnotes may be consolidated into a single region, post images may be displayed before the post title, and so […] Continue reading »
I recently developed a theme that makes heavy use of WordPress’ custom fields. The custom-field functionality of WordPress makes it possible to rig up just about any customized layout quickly and easily. Custom fields enable designers to organize post content into different sections, making it possible to create non-linear page layouts, with different types of content easily removed from the normal post loop and relocated to different parts of the document. This organizational and design flexibility has the added benefit […] Continue reading »
![[ Miscellaneous Color Slices ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/misc-snippets.jpg)
One of the original purposes of Perishable Press involved serving as a “virtual dumpster” for all of my miscellaneous code snippets. Over time, I continued elaborating to greater degrees on the various code recipes that I was posting, until eventually those brief snippet posts evolved into complete, richly detailed articles (at least from my point of view). Now that I enjoy the luxury of writing for an incredible audience, I try to avoid posting anything that doesn’t include an accompanying […] Continue reading »
In my previous article on WordPress title tags, How to Generate Perfect WordPress Title Tags without a Plugin, We explore everything needed to create perfect titles for your WordPress-powered site. After discussing the functionality and implementation of various code examples, the article concludes with a “perfect” title-tag script that covers all the bases. Or so I thought.. Some time after the article had been posted, Mat8iou chimed in with a couple of ways to improve thie script by cleaning up […] Continue reading »
Ever wanted to provide automatic language translations of your web pages without installing another plugin? Here is a valid, SEO-friendly technique that takes advantage of Google’s free translation service. All you need is a PHP-enabled server and you’re good to go. Just copy and paste the following code into the desired location in your page template and enjoy the results. Once in place, this code will produce translation links for eight common languages for every page on your site. Grab, […] Continue reading »
Recently, Joost de Valk shared an excellent technique for adding spam and delete buttons to comments on your WordPress-powered blog. The idea is to save administration time by providing links to either “spam” or “delete” individual comments without having to navigate through the WordPress Admin Area. Joost provides the following plug-n-play solution: Continue reading »
When building web pages, it is often necessary to add links that require parameterized query strings. For example, when adding links to the various validation services, you may find yourself linking to an accessibility checker, such as the freely available Cynthia service: Continue reading »
Simple one for you today. After posting on how to use HTAccess to redirect subordinate URLs to the root (or parent) directory, I thought I would share an alternate way of accomplishing the same trick using PHP. Fortunately, using this PHP redirect technique doesn’t require access to or fiddling with your site’s HTAccess (or Apache configuration) file and it is very easy to implement. The scene, as discussed in greater detail in my previous article on this topic, involves a […] Continue reading »
![[ Social Media ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/social-media-deco.png)
With the explosion of social media, networking, and bookmarking services, there are a zillion ways to add “Share This Post” functionality to your WordPress-powered sites. In addition to the myriad services and plugins, we can also add these links directly, using nothing more than a little markup and a few choice PHP snippets. Such individual links provide full control over the selection, layout, and styling of each link without requiring the installation of yet another WordPress plugin. This article shares […] 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 