Blacklist Candidate Number 2008-01-02

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 »

Optimize WordPress: Pure Code Alternatives for 7 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 »

How to Enable PHP Error Logging via htaccess

In this brief tutorial, I will show Apache users how to suppress PHP errors from visitors and enable PHP error logging via htaccess. Tracking your site’s PHP errors is an excellent way to manage and troubleshoot unexpected issues related to plugins and themes. Even better, monitoring PHP errors behind the scenes via private log is far better than trying to catch them as they appear at random visits. Thanks to the magical powers of htaccess, there is an easy way […] Continue reading »

5 Easy Ways to Syntax Highlight PHP Code

[ Screenshot: PHP code snippet in syntax-highlighted form ]

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 »

Easily Adaptable WordPress Loop Templates

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 »

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 »

Eliminate 404 Errors for PHP Functions

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 »

Super Loop: Exclude Specific Categories and Display any Number of Posts

[ Image: Detail view of a series of mechanical gears (black and white photo) ]

Readers occasionally ask for help with their WordPress loops. Usually, these requests involve modifying the loop with some customized functionality. Frequently, such customization involves one of these popular behaviors: Continue reading »

Temporary Site Redirect for Visitors during Site Updates

[ Image: Abstract Mathematical Diagram ]

In our article Stupid htaccess Tricks, we present the htaccess code required for redirecting visitors temporarily during periods of site maintenance. Although the article provides everything needed to implement the temporary redirect, I think readers would benefit from a more thorough examination of the process — nothing too serious, just enough to get it right. After discussing temporary redirects via htaccess, I’ll also explain how to accomplish the same thing using only a small slice of PHP. It’s like two […] 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 »

Another Mystery Solved..

Recently, after researching comment links for an upcoming article, I realized that my default <input /> values were being submitted as the URL for all comments left without associated website information. During the most recent site redesign, I made the mistake of doing this in comments.php: … <input class="input" name="url" id="url" value="[website]" onfocus="this.select();" type="text" tabindex="3" size="44" maxlength="133" alt="website" /> … Notice the value="[website]" attribute? It seemed like a good idea at the time — I even threw in a nice […] Continue reading »

Use PHP to Create Symbolic Links without Shell Access

On Unix systems, a symbolic link refers to a file that points to another file or directory. Symbolic links serve as powerful tools for web designers and developers. Using shell access, creating a symbolic link requires only one line of code: ln -s /home/username/public_html/directory1 /home/username/public_html/directory2 Simple enough. Assuming you have access to the linux shell. Unfortunately, many shared hosting environments deny shell access. Fortunately, creating symbolic links — also called “symlinks” — remains a possibility via the PHP symlink() function. […] Continue reading »

Go Back via JavaScript and PHP

This quick tutorial explains how to use HTML, JavaScript, and/or PHP to enable visitors to “go back” to the previous page. You can use either method to add a simple “go back” link or form button to your web pages. Continue reading »

Triple Loop for WordPress

Two of the themes developed by Perishable Press, Apathy and Information, depend on three WordPress loops to operate as intended. For each of these themes, the three loops consist of two “side” loops and one main loop. The side loops each display posts from one specific category, while the main loop displays posts from every category not specified in the side loops. Continue reading »

Customize WordPress Quicktags

WordPress Quicktags provide shortcuts for adding certain bits of code to your posts. The default set of quicktags includes some handy shortcut buttons for tags such as <strong></strong>, <a></a>, and <img />, as well as a few others. While the default set of quicktag buttons is occasionally useful, a quick bit of quicktag customization can easily transform your personal set of quicktag buttons into a deadly arsenal of time-saving code shortcuts. Continue reading »

Auto Clear and Restore Form Elements

Using a small bit of JavaScript, it is possible to auto-clear and restore form elements when users bring focus to them. Simply copy, paste, and modify the following code example to achieve an effect similar to this: Continue reading »

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