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 »
Would you like to display the total number of posts, comments, and categories for your WordPress-powered website? You can do it the easy way using my free WordPress plugin, Simple Blog Stats. Or you can display your statistics directly, by querying the WordPress database. Here is the code that can make it happen. Continue reading »
Let’s face it, spam sucks. Give spammers the figurative finger by using this nifty bit of JavaScript to hide your email address from the harvesters. Here is an easy copy-&-paste snippet for including a spam-proof email address in your web pages. Although there are a million ways of doing this, I am posting this for the record (and because I just can’t stand deleting usable code). This technique uses JavaScript, and therefore is not 100% ideal for all users. My […] Continue reading »
Check out these crazy CSS underline effects: Continue reading »
Consider this page a virtual dumpster of wonderful CSS hacks.. Continue reading »
Need to load a WordPress page conditionally? For example, perhaps you need a “special” page to appear for search results? Yes? This simple PHP/JavaScript solution may be just what the doctor ordered! Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
If you are running WordPress 2.0.2 and have enabled permalinks, you may have had problems creating a new category or page to your site. I recently encountered this dilemma and devised the following strategy for adding, editing, or even deleting WordPress categories and pages. Note: this tutorial assumes you are running Apache. Continue reading »
Improve accessibility by adding title attributes to your WordPress userspace. Note: This article applies specifically to WordPress 2.0.2, but may be generalized to any WP 2.0+ version. By default, WordPress navigation links omit the title attributes for both page and post views. Title attributes for links provide additional information that can improve the accessibility of your website. This is especially true when images or text symbols exclusively are used for navigation. To add title attributes to WordPress page-view links (e.g., […] Continue reading »
I recently enabled the permalinks feature for a fresh WordPress 2.0.2 upgrade. The process required several hours of research and approximately 90 minutes to fully implement. This brief article summarizes the process and applies to the following setup: Continue reading »
To add Lightbox functionality to any single image: Add rel="lightbox" to the anchor tag. Add a title="" attribute to the anchor tag. Add an alt="" attribute to the image tag. To add Lightbox functionality to any series of images: Add rel="lightbox[value]" to the anchor tag of each image. Add a title="" attribute to the anchor tag of each image. Add an alt="" attribute to the image tag of each image. Any set of pictures with the same rel="lightbox[value]" will display […] Continue reading »
Welcome to Perishable Press! This article covers a plethora of useful JavaScript tips and tricks. For more excellent JavaScript information, check out the JavaScript tag archive. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to Perishable Press for a periodic dose of online enlightenment ;) Nifty JavaScript Design Tricks Clickable divs Standard design practice dictates that the site logo or banner located at the top of the page links to the home page of the site. There are […] Continue reading »
I love looking at beautiful source-code output. However WordPress tends to spit code out in random chunks, often leaving spaces, line breaks, and tabs littered throughout the source output. This messes things up. Lists don’t look like lists and logically written code often appears scattered along the page carelessly. Often, this is the result of poorly written PHP, which can be manipulated to write beautifully aligned code that looks as good as it works. Continue reading »
Welcome to Perishable Press! This article covers many different aspects of WordPress functionality, including customizing quicktags, deleting the cache, numbering comments & posts, changing password text, and displaying archive menus. Note that this article was written for previous versions (i.e., less than 2.0) of WordPress. Discrepancies may exist between the code presented in this post and that of more recent versions of WordPress. Nonetheless, this information is presented for references purposes with the hope that it will prove useful for […] Continue reading »