In this brief tutorial, we are going to enable users to access any file or directory of a site that is password-protected via htaccess. There are many reasons for wanting to employ this technique, including: Share public resources from an otherwise private site Enable visitors to access content during site maintenance Testing and formatting of layout and design during development As a webmaster, I have used this technique on several occasions. This trick works great for allowing access to any […] Continue reading »
In this article, I present several heavily commented examples of WordPress loops. I have found that many readers appreciate these types of loop examples, as it helps them to understand how the loop works while enabling them to easily copy, paste, and adapt the code for their own purposes. In our first example, we examine a basic WordPress loop. When implemented, this loop will display “x” number of posts, where “x” represents the number specified via the WordPress Admin reading […] Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: broken footer positioning in IE 7 ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/script-tags/ie-incorrect.gif "a rather 'loose' footer as seen in IE 7")
By now, everyone is familiar with the Yahoo Developer Network’s 14 best-practices for speeding up your website. Certainly, many (if not all) of these performance optimization tips are ideal for high-traffic sites such as Yahoo or Google, but not all of them are recommended for smaller sites such as Perishable Press. Nonetheless, throughout the current site renovation project, I have attempted to implement as many of these practices as possible. At the time of this writing, I somehow have managed […] Continue reading »
The amount of time I spend surfing the Web from a mobile device has steadily increased since the acquisition of my new favorite mobile device. Unfortunately, many sites have yet to implement (or even consider) support for mobile devices. Without proper formatting, such sites are virtually useless, requiring unnecessary download times, displaying unreadable pages, and serving unusable content. Given the inevitable ubiquity of mobile access to the World Wide Web, providing reasonable support for handheld browsers is becoming increasingly important. […] Continue reading »
![[ Global CSS Reset ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/global-css-reset.png "Global Styles")
Using CSS to style semantically meaningful (X)HTML markup is an important key to modern web design practices. In a perfect world, every browser would interpret and apply all CSS rules in exactly the same way. However, in the imperfect world in which we live, quite the opposite frequently happens to be the case: many CSS styles are displayed differently in virtually every browser. Continue reading »
In the hellish battle against spam, many WordPress users have adopted a highly effective trinity of anti-spam plugins: Akismet Bad Behavior Spam Karma This effective triage of free WordPress plugins has served many a WP-blogger well, eliminating virtually 99% of all automated comment-related spam. When spam first became a problem for me, I installed this triple-threat arsenal of anti-spam plugins and immediately enjoyed the results. Although Spam Karma seemed a little invasive and resource-intensive, too much protection seemed far better […] Continue reading »
WordPress users employing permalinks via htaccess to optimize their dynamic URLs transform complicated-looking links such as: http://example.com/blog/index.php?page=33 ..into search-engine friendly links such as: http://example.com/blog/post-title/ Every rewritten URL relies on a common set of htaccess rules to transform the links. The htaccess rules for all WordPress permalinks look like this for root WP installations: Continue reading »
Recently, a reader named Max encountered some scrolling issues while implementing our absolutely centered layout technique. Of course, by “absolutely centered” we are referring to content that remains positioned dead-center regardless of how the browser is resized. After noticing the scrollbar deficiency, Max kindly dropped a comment to explain the issue: the div solution works well, only one problem maybe somebody can help: if you make the browser window smaller then the div is -> the scrollbar doenst fit right […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Death-metal rocker drunk with power ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/ultimate-nofollow-blacklist.jpg "Behold the power of ultimate blacklist!")
Several days ago, I posted an article explaining how to hack your own WordPress nofollow blacklist. Immediately thereafter, I published an elaborate article focusing on automatic methods of nofollow blacklisting via WordPress plugins. In this article, I expand on the original blacklist hack by incorporating functional differentiation between commentator links, trackbacks, and pingbacks. If anything, think of this as an exercise in hacking WordPress, rewarding in and of itself, if not otherwise entirely impractical. Of course, whenever possible, you should […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Inverted Eye Detail ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/dofollow-whitelist.jpg)
Before repenting of my filthy “nofollow” addiction, I experimented briefly with a “dofollow whitelist” for commentator URL links. The idea behind the whitelist is to reward frequent commentators, feed subscribers, site patrons, and other guests by selectively removing the automatically generated nofollow attributes from their associated comment-author links. For nofollow enthusiasts, a dofollow whitelist is a great way to show appreciation for people who support your blogging efforts. Now, before we go hacking away at WordPress, keep in mind that […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Extreme close-up of an eye (send email to purchase a full-size version) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/nofollow-blacklist.jpg)
Previously, in our unofficial “WordPress dofollow upgrade” series, we dished several techniques for removing the antisocial nofollow attributes from default installations of WordPress. After an exhaustive review of available dofollow plugins, we explained how drop-dead easy it is to transform any WordPress blog into a well-standing member of the dofollow community without relying on a plugin to do the job. Our next article detailed a nofollow removal hack that selectively targets pingbacks, trackbacks, and commentator links. Then, we went off […] Continue reading »
Encourage Comments by Completely Eliminating All Nofollow Links! Want to remove all traces of the hideous nofollow attribute without having to install yet another unnecessary plugin? By default, WordPress generates nofollow links in three different ways — this article will show you how to eliminate all of them.. Continue reading »
After our previous article, we all know how easy it is to kill the default nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator, trackback, and pingback links. Indeed, our original one-minute upgrade delivers dofollow links across the board, effectively passing the love juice to every type of response. Fine for some, but some need more.. In this article, we improve the original dofollow upgrade by differentiating between the three different response types. With our “deluxe” model, nofollow attributes may […] Continue reading »
Want to upgrade your blog to official dofollow status but don’t want to install another unnecessary plugin? This article explains how to eliminate nofollow tags from all trackback, pingback, and commentator links in less than one minute.. After finally repenting of my nofollow sins, I began looking for the best way to eliminate the nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator URL links. Of course, the most popular technique for removing nofollow attributes from comment links involves one […] 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 »
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