Ladies and gentlemen, things have become a little too comfortable around here. Themes are displaying with nary a hitch, files are being downloaded as expected, URLs are served like butter, and the site is experiencing fewer errors (PHP, 404, etc.) than ever before. After two years of perpetual updating, posting, fixing, and tweaking, Perishable Press is finally performing exactly as desired (all things considered, of course). Yes sir, things are running quite smooth indeed.. A little too smooth. Sure, given […] Continue reading »
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 »
![[ Mint Icon ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/fluid-mint.png "Have a Mint")
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 »
WordPress users employing permalinks via htaccess to optimize their dynamic URLs transform complicated-looking links such as: http://example.com/blog/index.php?page=33 ..into search-engine friendly links such as: http://example.com/blog/post-title/ Every rewritten URL relies on a common set of htaccess rules to transform the links. The htaccess rules for all WordPress permalinks look like this for root WP installations: # BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </ifmodule> # END WordPress ..and like this for […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Surrealistic Anatomical Abstraction by EightyEightTeeth ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/eightyeightart.jpg)
Anatomical Abstraction Longtime friend and fellow-DLa member ThaneC recently has updated his personal slash portfolio site, eightyeightteeth.com. With the help of Monzilla Media, ThaneC’s site has been completely redesigned and reorganized, featuring easy navigation and generous presentation of core content. Every page is overflowing with creative juice — thumbnail galleries of artistic works, digital photos, and custom wallpapers are a pleasure to browse. Full-size versions of each creative piece “pop-up” upon command. ThaneC’s unpretentious wit and artistic sincerity furnish each […] Continue reading »
Recently, a reader named Max encountered some scrolling issues while implementing our absolutely centered layout technique. Of course, by “absolutely centered” we are referring to content that remains positioned dead-center regardless of how the browser is resized. After noticing the scrollbar deficiency, Max kindly dropped a comment to explain the issue: the div solution works well, only one problem maybe somebody can help: if you make the browser window smaller then the div is -> the scrollbar doenst fit right […] Continue reading »
When I first began Perishable Press, I intended the site to focus primarily on the creative side of web and graphic design. However, I also wanted to share equally my ideas and experiences involving music, video, and other multimedia avenues of creative expression. Further, because I enjoy writing, and find myself frequently focusing on art, inspiration, and artistic expression, the initial plan encompassed a perpetual exploration and presentation of these topics here at Perishable Press. Two years later, the original […] Continue reading »
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 »
In this post I have assembled a concise collection of conforming, bare-bones document templates for just about every DOCTYPE for HTML, XHTML, and more. Continue reading »
![[ Image: Tyrannosaurus Skull ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/html-dinosaur.jpg)
HTML 5, also known as Web Applications 1.0, provides new markup elements that will change the way you design your web pages. The new elements replace commonly used divisions in web documents, facilitating an even greater degree of separation between structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS). Indeed, in many documents, the new elements will structure the document while providing enough hooks to render obsolete previously required divisions, classes, and identifiers. Let’s take a look.. Continue reading »
![[ Image: Black and white illustration of the upper half of a man's suspicious, paranoid face ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/yahoo-suspicious.jpg)
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 »
![[ Image: Two Hip Characters ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/essential-characters.gif)
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 »
![[ Icon: DLa Joker ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/dla-slideshow.jpg)
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 »
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 »
![[ Image: Fabulous Shot of Immortal's Abbath and Horgh ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/absolutely-fabulous.jpg)
..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 »
![[ Image: Skeletor Blocks a Move ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/block-senders.jpg "'Sorry, but access is NOT allowed - ha ha ha ha ha!'")
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 »
