![[ Contact Coldform ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/wp-coldskins/coldform-icon_small.jpg){kind=icon}
With the recent release of my latest WordPress plugin, Contact Coldform, I am also creating a series of free, “drop-in” CSS skins for easy, “plug-n-play” customization. These skins employ valid, optimized CSS code designed for the following browsers: Continue reading »
![[ Image: Coldform Icon ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/wp-coldform/coldform-icon.png "Contact Coldform"){kind=icon}
Welcome to the homepage for Contact Coldform, a secure, lightweight, flexible contact form with plenty of options and squeaky clean markup. Coldform blocks spam while making it easy for your visitors to contact you from your WordPress-powered website. The comprehensive Settings Page makes it easy to take full control with plenty of options and several built-in themes for styling the form. Coldform delivers everything you need and nothing you don’t — no frills, no gimmicks, just pure contact-form satisfaction. Now […] Continue reading »
![[ Photo: Bob Barker Pointing ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/blacklisted/2008-01-02.jpg "Come on down! You're the next hapless turd to get blocked!")
Welcome to the Perishable Press “Blacklist Candidate” series! In this first post, we begin a new tradition of exposing, humiliating and banishing spammers, crackers and other worthless scumbags.. Every Wednesday, I take a little time to investigate my 404 error logs. In addition to spam, crack attacks, and other deliberate mischief, the 404 logs for Perishable Press contain errors due to missing resources, mistyped URLs, and the occasional bizarre or even suspicious behavior of the search-engine robots. Whenever possible, I […] Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: showing the relatively immense size of the WP-ShortStat table ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/wpstats-flush/stats-table_01.gif "Indeed, after only a month or so, our ss_stats table is over 180,000 rows thick and over 45,000 Kilobytes in size.")
In this article, I present a simple method for dramatically decreasing the size of your WordPress database by partially emptying old data from the WP-ShortStat table via the following SQL command: DELETE FROM `wp_ss_stats` ORDER BY `id` ASC LIMIT n That is the point of this entire article, which dips into just about everything one might need to know before employing such strategy. If you are familiar with SQL and understand the purpose and functionality of this command, feel free […] Continue reading »
![[ Photo: Macro shot of a Yttrium claw ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/wordpress-plugin.jpg "Unplug Unnecessary Plugins")
In this article, my goal is to help you optimize WordPress by replacing a few common plugins with their correspondingly effective code equivalents. As we all know, WordPress can be a very resource-hungry piece of software, especially when running a million extraneous plugins. Often, many common plugins are designed to perform relatively simple tasks, such as redirect a feed, display a random image, query the database, etc. For those of us comfortable with editing PHP and htaccess code, there is […] Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: PHP code snippet in syntax-highlighted form ]](/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/syntax-highlight.png "The colors applied to the various code elements are automatically generated via the PHP engine")
A great to way to share your PHP code with visitors is to display it directly in the browser with automatically generated syntax highlighting. Here is a screenshot showing an example of syntax-highlighted PHP code: Displaying your PHP scripts in syntax-highlighted form is an excellent way to share source code details directly with your readers. Rather than zipping the script and requiring users to download, unzip, and open the file in an editor, displaying your code directly saves you and […] 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 »
CLB+ As many WordPress users now realize, there have been many fundamental changes in the new version of WordPress. The latest version of WordPress — 2.3 — features a considerably revamped database structure, including a complete reorganization and redistribution of the wp_categories table. Unfortunately, such database alterations have rendered inoperable many popular plugins, proving quite unfortunate not only for millions of WordPress users, but also for those of us who donate time, effort, and resources toward the development of freely […] Continue reading »
