RefreshMints: Refresh Stats Bookmarklets for Mint 2

Last week, I finally got around to upgrading to Mint 2.14. The new version is quite impressive, and well worth the time (and cash) spent upgrading. In the process, however, one of my favorite, most heavily used bookmarklet things ceased to work. Before the upgrade, I had been enjoying the highly useful Refresh-All bookmarklet by Jonathan Snook. Snook’s Mint-refresh bookmarklet made it super-easy to update all Mint data panels without having to refresh the entire page. Using the bookmarklet is […] Continue reading »

Yahoo! in my Blackhole

Okay, I realize that the title sounds a bit odd, but nowhere near as odd as my recent discovery of Slurp ignoring explicit robots.txt rules and digging around in my highly specialized bot trap, which I have lovingly dubbed “the blackhole”. What is up with that, Yahoo!? — does your Slurp spider obey robots.txt directives or not? I have never seen Google crawling around that side of town, neither has MSN nor even Ask ventured into the forbidden realms. Has […] Continue reading »

How to Verify the Four Major Search Engines

Keeping track of your access and error logs is a critical component of any serious security strategy. Many times, you will see a recorded entry that looks legitimate, such that it may easily be dismissed as genuine Google fare, only to discover upon closer investigation a fraudulent agent. There are many such cloaked or disguised agents crawling around these days, mimicking various search engines to hide beneath the radar. So it’s always a good idea to implement a procedure for […] Continue reading »

Fixing Mint after Switching Servers

After switching Perishable Press to its current home at A Small Orange, I began noticing an unusual problem with referrer data displayed in Mint. Specifically, the first item recorded in the XXX Strong Mint data panel — for both “Most Recent” and “Repeat” views — displayed several thousand hits for various site resources, all reporting the following IP address: Continue reading »

Mind-Blowing Web-2.0 Design Trends

The über-trendy “Web-2.0” paradigm seems to be floating quite comfortably throughout the blogosphere these days. In fact, with it’s current mainstream popularity, the Web-2.0 mentality enjoys de facto status as the dominating influence behind modern website development and design. Not too long ago, however, Web-2.0 hovered quietly amidst the thinking of cutting-edge entrepreneurs and developers, as they strove toward freshness, simplicity, and usability. Before it’s rise to media fame, Web 2.0 was merely a loosely defined set of concepts and […] Continue reading »

Suspicious Behavior from Yahoo! Slurp Crawler

[ Image: Black and white illustration of the upper half of a man's suspicious, paranoid face ]

Most of the time, when I catch scumbags attempting to spam, scrape, leech, or otherwise hack my site, I stitch up a new voodoo doll and let the cursing begin. No, seriously, I just blacklist the idiots. I don’t need their traffic, and so I don’t even blink while slamming the doors in their faces. Of course, this policy presents a bit of a dilemma when the culprit is one of the four major search engines. Slamming the door on […] Continue reading »

Essential HTML Entities

Virtually every article written here at Perishable Press requires at least one or two “special” HTML characters. Some of these characters — such as quotation marks, hyphens, and dashes — are very common, while others — such as the copyright symbol, bullet, and arrow — happen less frequently. The vast majority of special characters, however, like the latin Ä (i.e., capital letter “A” with a diaeresis), and the mathematical symbol ⊃ (i.e., superset), rarely see the light of day on […] Continue reading »

Slideshow Code for Dead Letter Art

Pardon this post! I am posting this information online for personal references purposes. I may need to revisit this code at some point in the future, and if I post it here I will always know where to find it (trust me, it would disappear into the abyss if I tried storing it offline). So, although it is intended solely for myself, feel free to extract and use anything you like, as long as commented attribution remains. What we have […] Continue reading »

MySQL Magic: Find and Replace Data

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 »

Absolutely Fabulous Browser Bookmarklet Things

[ Image: Fabulous Shot of Immortal's Abbath and Horgh ]

..Or something. Frankly, I just needed an excuse to post these steaming little beauties online. Please note that I don’t lay claim to most of these browser bookmarklet/favelet tricks, but I do find them extremely useful. They are posted here for the sake of convenience and for reference purposes, so use at your own risk (i.e., I am not responsible if they crash your browser). Although I use most of these bad boys with Firefox, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised […] Continue reading »

How to Block IP Addresses with PHP

Figuratively speaking, hunting down and killing spammers, scrapers, and other online scum remains one of our favorite pursuits. Once we have determined that a particular IP address is worthy of banishment, we generally invoke the magical powers of htaccess to lock the gates. When htaccess is not available, we may summon the versatile functionality of PHP to get the job done. This method is straightforward. Simply edit, copy and paste the following code example into the top of any PHP […] Continue reading »

SEO 101: Best Practices

After studying Peter Kent’s excellent book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, several key methods emerged for optimizing websites for the search engines. Although the book is written for people who are new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), many of the principles presented throughout the book remain important, fundamental practices even for the most advanced SEO-wizards. This article divulges these very useful SEO practices and organizes them into manageable chunks. Continue reading »

Harvesting cPanel Raw Access Logs

For those of you using cPanel as the control panel for our websites, a wealth of information is readily available via cPanel ‘Raw Access Logs’. The cPanel log files perpetually are updated with data. Each logged visit includes information about the user agent, IP address, HTTP response, request URI, request size, and a whole lot more. To help you make use of this potentially valuable information, here is a quick tutorial on accessing and interpreting your cPanel raw access logs. […] Continue reading »

Search Engine Registration Notes

In his excellent book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Peter Kent explains that many search engines actually get their search results from one (or more) of the larger search engines, such as Google or The Open Directory Project. Therefore, the author concludes that it may not be necessary to spend endless hours registering with thousands of the smaller search sites. Rather, the author provides a brief list of absolutely essential search sites with which it is highly recommended to register. […] Continue reading »

SEO 101: Establishing and Evolving an Effective Link Strategy

Optimizing your website for the search engines involves many important aspects including keyword development, search engine registration, and SEO logging. This Perishable Press tutorial scopes yet another critical weapon in the SEO wars: establishing and evolving an effective link campaign. We will begin our article by focusing on incoming and outgoing link strategies, proceed with a few tips for internal links, and then conclude with some ideas for getting links. Continue reading »

Essential Mint Extensions

As many statistics freaks already know, Mint is an excellent way to keep a close eye on your site’s visitors, referrers, most requested resources, and much more. Even better, Mint’s functionality is easily enhanced via a growing collection of free extensions referred to as “Peppers”. Peppers provide Mint functionality for a wide range of statistical operations, including everything from geographical IP information to nice, graphical summaries of collected data. Continue reading »

« Newer Posts • 123456 • Previous Posts »