Your website’s robots.txt file probably contains some rules that tell compliant search engines and other bots which pages they can visit, and which are not allowed, etc. In most of the robots.txt files that I’ve looked at, all of the Allow and Disallow rules are applied to all user agents. This is done with the wildcard operator, which is written as an asterisk *, like this: User-agent: * This site’s robots.txt file provides a typical example. All of the allow/disallow […] Continue reading »
Prismatic is a free WordPress plugin that adds syntax highlighting to code samples. You can use either Highlight.js or Prism.js to make your code snippets look amazing. By default, Prismatic highlights code snippets in both post content and post comments. This quick tutorial shows how to disable highlighting in post comments by adding a simple code snippet to your WordPress. Estimated time to complete ~2 minutes. Continue reading »
Prismatic is a free WordPress plugin that adds syntax highlighting to code samples. You can use either Highlight.js or Prism.js to make your code snippets look amazing. This quick tutorial shares a way to customize Prismatic to save time scrolling thru a bunch of language options. Huge time-saver and simple to implement in a few minutes. Continue reading »
I haven’t seen anyone mention this little CSS tip. All the proprietary vendor-specific placeholder rules now safely can be replaced with just ::placeholder. Seems very useful especially with the ever-increasing emphasis on site performance. The end result is less code and thus faster loading, better SEO and so forth. Continue reading »
Everyone knows that slow loading and/or insecure websites are horrible, just the worst to be avoided at all costs. But there are other, less obvious ways to destroy the user experience and well, just make things suck in general. The goal here is to raise awareness and have some fun. So without further ado, here are my top 10 weird ways to ruin your website, along with their real-world equivalents.. Continue reading »
I’ve always made use of CSS text-decoration properties in my theme designs and other dev work. From underlining text to making hyperlinks look great, text-decoration is essential CSS. Until recently I was not aware of a couple of related properties, text-underline-offset and text-underline-position. I am currently planning the next redesign of Perishable Press and thinking about using text-underline-offset to add some style to various link elements. So this post is to bring these related CSS properties together on paper, forever […] Continue reading »
Heads up about the JavaScript Errors Notifier extension for Google Chrome. Looks like it was removed from the Chrome store sometime last year. Not sure of the reason behind it, but can tell you that currently there are no suitable extensions to replace it. Kinda sucks because JavaScript Errors Notifier was one of my favorite “always on” extensions. It makes it easy to spot any JavaScript errors as you develop, design, or browse the Web. Fortunately there’s still a way […] Continue reading »
It’s sad that we’ve arrived at a place where it needs to be said. Unfortunately, 3rd-party email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and so forth have to deal with tons and tons of spam. So they tend to use very aggressive spam-filtering rules. Overly aggressive, in many cases. Continue reading »
I’ve tried 1Password and Dashlane, and several other popular password managers for both Mac and PC. It always seems to be the same thing: things start off great and then go downhill from there. For example, I was loving 1Password, and then it locked me out of my password file/account. Likewise for a couple of years Dashlane was great, but then they started making drastic changes like moving from standalone app to browser extension Web-based UI. The confusion involved with […] Continue reading »
There are numerous ways to redirect requests using Apache’s mod_rewrite and mod_alias. This concise, friendly tutorial explains different ways to redirect a range of IP addresses, either IPv4 or IPv6. Continue reading »
Working on the redesign of Plugin Planet, I needed a way to toggle between two divs based on which radio input is selected. This is useful for showing option-specific information conditionally, depending on the current active radio select field. This tutorial shows how to achieve it using vanilla JavaScript, so there is no need for including an entire library like jQuery. Very simple technique, requiring minimal amount of HTML markup and vanilla JavaScript. Continue reading »
Let’s say you have some .htaccess rewrite rules in place using Apache’s mod_rewrite. By default if the rewrite rules are located in the root directory, they will be applied to every subdirectory, as expected. But what if you need to disable the rewrite rules so that they do not affect some specific sub-directory or sub-folder? This super quick tutorial shows the easiest way to do it. Continue reading »
Have you ever wanted to make a WordPress site private? So that only specific users are allowed access? For example, for my found-images site eChunks.com, I decided to require user login in order to access any content. So now for that site, public access is not allowed, and any posts, images, and all other content is available only to logged-in users. This tutorial explains four ways to make a WordPress site private or members only, so that only authenticated/trusted users […] Continue reading »
Want to stop Google Chrome browser from constantly asking for permission to “know your location”? This mini tutorial shows how to do it quickly and easily, for Google Chrome versions (around) 83 and better. Continue reading »
By now most have heard about the WP Sitemaps feature introduced in WordPress version 5.5. From what I’ve read most existing sites that needed a sitemap already had one via one of the many free sitemap plugins. But for new WordPress sites going forward, having all the sitemap code in the WordPress core now means that new sites have the option of rolling with the default WordPress sitemaps, or use a dedicated plugin to do the job. This post is […] Continue reading »
This post is a bit different than my regular in-depth tutorials. This is where I scribble down notes and thoughts about my experience switching from Photoshop (PS) to Affinity Photo (AP). As I continue to learn AP and collect more notes, I’ll add them to this post. It’s an informal work in progress. To give some context of where I’m coming from, I have around 20 years experience working with Photoshop (and other Adobe apps). Like many others, for me […] 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 