![[ Twitter ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/twitter-tricks/twitter-tricks_00.png)
Might as well face it, Twitter is here to stay. Not that it’s all that bad, just used to be a lot more laid-back and enjoyable. These days it seems to have been taken over by the lowest common-denominator, mostly high-school twits or useless commercial propaganda. Even so, I still enjoy tweeting the occasional profound thought once in awhile, and even like to play around with various types of “advanced” Twitter functionality. You know, cool stuff like including “Tweet This!” links […] Continue reading »
When developing the colorful Quintessential Theme (opens in new tab), I initially planned on displaying five random posts from each of my most popular tags and categories in the super-slick sliding-panel sidebar. Because I am running an older version of WordPress, however, this task proved to be quite the educational experience. In newer versions (from 2.5 I think) of WordPress, the query_posts() function enables users to display posts in random order using the orderby=rand parameter. This would have made my […] Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: The Legion of Doom ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/multiple-addresses.jpg)
Let’s face it. There’s just as much scum on the Internet as there is out there in the “real world.” Maybe even more, who knows. From scammers and spammers to scrapers and crackers, the Web is just crawling with all sorts of pathetic scumbags. As predictably random as much of the malicious activity happens to be, it is virtually guaranteed that you will be hounded by at least a few persistent IP addresses that, for whatever reason, have latched on […] Continue reading »
I finally broke down and uninstalled Alex King’s once-great “Popularity Contest” plugin for WordPress. The plugin had been active here at Perishable Press for over two years, and had provided fairly consistent and apparently accurate statistics while in service. Unfortunately, there were serious errors involved with the plugin way back during the WordPress-2.3 upgrade that were never addressed by the plugin author. There was an interim version of the plugin that had patched the error until an official update was […] Continue reading »
Normally, when visitors post a comment to your site, specific types of client data are associated with the request. Commonly, a client will provide a user agent, a referrer, and a host header. When any of these variables is absent, there is good reason to suspect foul play. For example, virtually all browsers provide some sort of user-agent name to identify themselves. Conversely, malicious scripts directly posting spam and other payloads to your site frequently operate without specifying a user […] Continue reading »
When designing sites, it is often useful to identify different pages by adding an ID attribute to the <body></body> element. Commonly, the name of the page is used as the attribute value, for example: <body id="about"></body> In this case, “about” would be the body ID for the “About” page, which would be named something like “about.php”. Likewise, other pages would have unique IDs as well, for example: <body id="archive"> </body><body id="contact"> </body><body id="subscribe"> </body><body id="portfolio"></body> ..again, with each ID associated […] Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: WP Default Database Error Page ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/install-security/h4x0rd_03.gif "Error establishing a database connection")
The other day, my server crashed and Perishable Press was unable to connect to the MySQL database. Normally, when WordPress encounters a database error, it delivers a specific error message similar to the following: Continue reading »
Importing and displaying external RSS feeds on your site is a great way to share your online activity with your visitors. If you are active on Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, or Tumblr, your visitors will enjoy staying current with your updates. Many social media sites provide exclusive feeds for user-generated content that may be imported and displayed on virtually any web page. In this article, you will learn three ways to import and display feed content on your WordPress-powered website — […] Continue reading »
In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template: <a href="mailto:?subject=Fresh%20Linkage%20@%20Perishable%20Press&body=Check%20out%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>%20from%20Perishable%20Press" title="Send a link to this post via email" rel="nofollow">Share […] Continue reading »
Canonical URLs are important for maintaining consistent linkage, reducing duplicate content issues, and increasing the overall integrity of your site. In addition to cleaning up trailing slashes and removing extraneous index.php and index.html strings, removing the www subdirectory prefix is an excellent way to shorten links and deliver consistent, canonical URLs. Of course, an optimal way of removing (or adding) the www prefix is accomplished via HTAccess canonicalization: Continue reading »
After hearing about the recently released premium version of Dyasonhat’s Smart Sort Plugin for WordPress, I just had to give it a try. Occasionally working on projects requiring customized ordering of posts, I like to keep my utility belt well-equipped with any plugins or code techniques that will facilitate the process of man-handling post order. In this article, I discuss my experience with WP Smart Sort Premium. Continue reading »
![[ Image: Abstract Mathematical Diagram ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/temp-redirect.jpg)
In my previous article on temporarily redirecting visitors during site updates, I present numerous PHP and HTAccess methods for handling traffic during site maintenance, updates, and other temporary periods of downtime. Each of the PHP methods presented in the article allow for access from a single IP while redirecting everyone else. In this article, we modify our previous techniques to allow access for multiple IP addresses while temporarily redirecting everyone else to the page of our choice. Plus, while we’re […] Continue reading »
![[ Echo Shortcut Code ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/echo-shortcut.png)
Most of us learned how to use “echo()” in one of our very first PHP tutorials. That was certainly the case for me. As a consequence, I never really had a need to visit PHP’s documentation page for echo(). On a recent visit to Perishable Press, I saw a Tumblr post from Jeff about the use of PHP’s shortcut syntax for echo() but somewhere deep in my memory, there lurked a warning about its use. I decided to investigate. Continue reading »
Several months after the release of the Arabic and Spanish versions of Contact Coldform, I am pleased to announce the release of a French translation of the plugin. The new French translation is graciously provided by Tony Tohme, who is also helping with the upcoming Russian translation of the Coldform. So huge “Thank you” to Tony! :) Continue reading »
If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use Feedburner to track your feed statistics, this article describes a relatively simple, “roll-your-own” alternative. Instead of redirecting your feed traffic through Feedburner, keep your original feed URLs and place the following code into a file named “feed_stats.php” (or whatever) and upload to your server: Continue reading »
![[ Magnetic Fields ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/custom-fields/custom-fields.jpg)
As we have seen in our previous post, WordPress Custom Fields Part I, custom fields provide an excellent way to add flexible content to your posts and pages. By assigning various types of content to different custom fields, you gain complete control over when, where, and how to display the associated information. For example, sub-headings may be displayed in the sidebar, footnotes may be consolidated into a single region, post images may be displayed before the post title, and so […] Continue reading »
