Protect Against Malicious POST Requests

Whether you like it or not, there are scripts and bots out there hammering away at your sites with endless HTTP “POST” requests. POST requests are sort of the opposite of GET requests. Instead of getting some resource or file from the server, data is being posted or sent to it. To illustrate, normal surfing around the Web involves your browser making series of GET requests for all the resources required for each web page. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, et […] Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: USP Pro

After months of deleopment and a low-key “soft-launch”, I’m pleased to announce my first premium WordPress plugin, USP Pro, the supercharged version of my free WP plugin, User Submitted Posts. USP Pro enables you to create and customize infinitely many front-end forms and display them anywhere on your WordPress-powered site. Continue reading »

Testing HTTP Requests

Just a quick post with some tips for troubleshooting and testing HTTP requests. For example, if you have a plugin that sends requests behind the scenes via Ajax or cURL or whatever, it’s nice to have a way to view request details such as headers, the response, and everything in between. This article is aimed primarily at WordPress users, but contains more general tips and tricks as well. Continue reading »

(Please) Stop Using Unsafe Characters in URLs

Just as there are specifications for designing with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, there are specifications for working with URIs/URLs. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) clearly defines these specifications in RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax. Within that document, there are guidelines regarding which characters may be used safely within URIs. This post summarizes the information, and encourages developers to understand and implement accordingly. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Simple Basic Contact Form

Simple Basic Contact Form is a clean, secure, plug-n-play contact form for WordPress. Minimal yet flexible, SBCF delivers clean code, solid performance, and ease of use. No frills, no gimmicks, just a straight-up contact form that’s easy to set up and style for any theme. For a contact form with more options and features, check out Contact Coldform, or continue reading to learn more about Simple Basic Contact Form. Either way, thanks for visiting. Continue reading »

CSS Hooks for User Submitted Posts

Here is a list of all CSS hooks available for the User Submitted Posts submission form. If you notice any errors or if I’ve missed anything, please let me know with a comment or by sending an email via my contact form. Thanks! Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Simple Ajax Chat

Simple Ajax Chat displays a fully customizable Ajax-powered chat box anywhere on your site. SAC makes it easy for your visitors to chat with each other on your website. There already are a number of decent chat plugins, but I wanted one that is simple yet fully customizable with all the features AND outputs clean HTML markup for easy styling. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Show Support Ribbon

Show Support Ribbon is a free WordPress plugin that displays a customizable “show support” ribbon, banner, or badge on your site. Show support for your favorite cause, event, charity, political event, or anything else that’s awesome. Show Support Ribbon includes four built-in ribbon styles and makes it easy to customize further with your own CSS. Continue reading »

CSS Hooks for Contact Coldform

Here is a complete list of CSS hooks (selectors) for the freshly revamped WordPress plugin, Contact Coldform. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Simple Blog Stats

Simple Blog Stats is a free WordPress plugin that provides a wealth of shortcodes and tags to display a variety of unique statistics about your site. Stats about your blog include total number of categories, comments, posts, users, tags, and more. SBS also displays recent comments and recent posts in posts, pages, and anywhere in your theme. Plus additional stats for Custom Post Types, word counts, and much more. Continue reading »

BBQ Firewall (Free WordPress Plugin)

BBQ Firewall is a lightweight, super-fast plugin that protects your site against a wide range of threats. BBQ checks all incoming traffic and quietly blocks bad requests containing nasty stuff like eval(, base64_, and excessively long request-strings. This is a simple yet solid solution for sites that are unable to use a strong Apache/.htaccess firewall. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Simple Custom Content

Simple Custom Content is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add custom content to your posts and feeds. SCS enables you to add custom content to all of your posts and all of your feeds, and provides several shortcodes for adding custom content in specific posts, pages, and just about anywhere. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Simple Statistics for Feeds

Simple Statistics for Feeds is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to track your feeds, add custom content, and display your feed statistics on your site. Simple Statistics for Feeds (SFS) tracks your feeds automatically, and provides a wealth of tools and options for further configuration and management. To see Simple Statistics for Feeds in action, check out my code-snippets site, WP-Mix.com (you can find the SFS count badge in the sidebar on any page). Continue reading »

SFS Open Tracking

In the Simple Feed Stats plugin, Open Tracking enables you to track any web page or feed anywhere on the Web. This is done by using the open-tracking URL as the src for any <img /> tag. The SFS plugin then collects and displays the data, and provides shortcodes and template tags to display your feed stats anywhere on your site. In this post, we’ll see how to implement Open Tracking, walk through some examples, and glean a few tips […] Continue reading »

expose_php, Easter Eggs, and .htaccess

A reader recently brought to my attention a reported vulnerability on servers running PHP. It’s been known about for eons, but it’s new to me and it involves easter eggs in PHP so I thought it would be fun to share a quick post about what it is and how to prevent leakage of sensitive information about your server. It only takes a moment to disable the easter-egg information, should you decide to do so. Continue reading »

Clean Markup Widget for WordPress

Squeaky clean. When adding content to your sidebar, it’s nice to be able to output clean, well-formatted markup. There are several ways to do this, including adding HTML directly in the theme template, installing a plugin, or simply using a widget. Widgets provide a great way of customizing sidebars and other widgetized areas, but as you may have seen in the source-code, the HTML is treated with all sorts of additional attributes, elements, and classes. Sometimes, you just need a […] Continue reading »

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