Is that spam or are you just trying to comment? Removing nofollow attributes from your WordPress-powered site is a great way to encourage comments and attract visitors. Many commentators will leave useful, constructive feedback, but there will always be a few losers who would attempt to game your generous link love. Fortunately, identifying these mindless link whores is relatively easy. Here are a few priceless examples of actual spam (i.e., linked) comments left here at Perishable Press (links removed for […] Continue reading »
Recently, while deliberating an optimal method for eliminating nofollow link attributes from Perishable Press, I collected, installed, tested and reviewed every WordPress no-nofollow/dofollow plugin that I could find. In this article, I present a concise, current, and comprehensive reference for WordPress no-nofollow and dofollow plugins. Every attempt has been made to provide accurate, useful, and complete information for each of the plugins represented below. Further, as this subject is a newfound interest of mine, it is my intention to keep […] Continue reading »
During the most recent Perishable Press redesign, I noticed that several of my WordPress admin pages had been assigned significant levels of PageRank. Not good. After some investigation, I realized that my ancient robots.txt rules were insufficient in preventing Google from indexing various WordPress admin pages. Specifically, the following pages have been indexed and subsequently assigned PageRank: Continue reading »
Recently, I discussed the suspicious behavior recently observed by the Yahoo! Slurp crawler. As revealed by the site’s closely watched 404-error logs, Yahoo! had been requesting a series of nonexistent resources. Although a majority of the 404 errors were exclusive to the Slurp crawler, there were several instances of requests that were also coming from Google, Live, and even Ask. Initially, these distinct errors were misdiagnosed as existing URLs appended with various JavaScript functions. Here are a few typical examples […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Detail view of a series of mechanical gears (black and white photo) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/super-loop.png)
Readers occasionally ask for help with their WordPress loops. Usually, these requests involve modifying the loop with some customized functionality. Frequently, such customization involves one of these popular behaviors: Continue reading »
![[ Image: Abstract Mathematical Diagram ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/temp-redirect.jpg)
In our article Stupid htaccess Tricks, we present the htaccess code required for redirecting visitors temporarily during periods of site maintenance. Although the article provides everything needed to implement the temporary redirect, I think readers would benefit from a more thorough examination of the process — nothing too serious, just enough to get it right. After discussing temporary redirects via htaccess, I’ll also explain how to accomplish the same thing using only a small slice of PHP. It’s like two […] Continue reading »
Recently, I needed to find and replace all instances of “http://website” in the wp_comments table of the WordPress database. Fortunately, SQL provides a simple way to find and replace data with its wonderful UPDATE function. Continue reading »
Recently, after researching comment links for an upcoming article, I realized that my default <input /> values were being submitted as the URL for all comments left without associated website information. During the most recent site redesign, I made the mistake of doing this in comments.php: … <input class="input" name="url" id="url" value="[website]" onfocus="this.select();" type="text" tabindex="3" size="44" maxlength="133" alt="website" /> … Notice the value="[website]" attribute? It seemed like a good idea at the time — I even threw in a nice […] Continue reading »
For over a year now, I have been using Markus Kämmerer’s (Happy Arts Blog) WP-ShortStat plugin for WordPress. The plugin is relatively well-maintained and remains one of my favorite admin tools. Great for popping in on stats without logging into Mint. Nonetheless, due to its IP/country-detection functionality, WP-ShortStat has experienced its share of difficulties (e.g., read through the change log on the plugin’s home page). In this article, I describe how WP-Shortstat slows down the root index-page of a site, […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Export Blogroll Icon ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/export-blogroll.jpg)
Announcing an easy way to export and automatically format your WordPress Blogroll for import into your del.icio.us social bookmarking account! The Export Blogroll plugin for del.icio.us simplifies the process of transferring your WordPress Blogroll to your del.icio.us account. del.icio.us now provides a way to import multiple links with a single file, however the file must emulate a specific (browser bookmark) format. The Export Blogroll plugin automatically formats your exported Blogroll content according to del.icio.us batch-upload specifications, making it super-easy to […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: del.icio.us Icon ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/delicious-icon.png)
After our recent WordPress-2.1 blogroll debacle, we concluded that the WordPress Links Manager (aka the Blogroll) is no longer a viable, long-term solution for managing bookmark collections containing large numbers of links. A far better solution, in the eyes of many savvy web users, is the free social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Using del.icio.us for over a year now, we have found it to be highly flexible, always reliable, and infinitely extensible. Plus, as a social bookmark service, everyone benefits from […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Chain Linkage ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/symbolic-linkage.jpg)
On Unix systems, a symbolic link refers to a file that points to another file or directory. Symbolic links serve as powerful tools for web designers and developers. Using shell access, creating a symbolic link requires only one line of code: ln -s /home/username/public_html/directory1 /home/username/public_html/directory2 Simple enough. Assuming you have access to the linux shell. Unfortunately, many shared hosting environments deny shell access. Fortunately, creating symbolic links — also called “symlinks” — remains a possibility via the PHP symlink() function. […] Continue reading »
This quick tutorial explains how to use HTML, JavaScript, and/or PHP to enable visitors to “go back” to the previous page. You can use either method to add a simple “go back” link or form button to your web pages. Continue reading »
Announcing the release of AddMySite (AMS) version 0.77. The new version features support for syndicated content feeds, and enables users to add their site’s feed to fifteen different feed-syndication and social-aggregator sites. 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 »
Note to WordPress 2.0.5 users: Everything was working fine on this site before upgrading to WP 2.0.5. After upgrading, apparently, our feeds stopped validating and the BDP RSS Aggregator plugin refused to update our own feeds. After several hours investigating the situation, we determined that the Live Comment Preview plugin was interfering with our feeds validating, while the upgraded WordPress (2.0.5) was responsible for problems with the BDP plugin. Continue reading »
