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144 posts related to: Tools to check your site’s health

Roll Your Own SEO Log

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the business of every serious webmaster. The process of optimizing a website for the search engines involves much more than properly constructed document headers and anchor tags. Websites are like trees: their roots are the growing collection of content presented through the branching universe of the World Wide Web. Or something. The point is that optimizing a website requires nurturing the site itself while also ensuring proper exposure to the requisite elements of the internet. Continue reading »

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) Formats

There are currently three formats for expressing date/time in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). All examples represent the date, July 04, 2050. The time for all three formats is expressed as hour:minutes:seconds. Continue reading »

SEO 101: Keyword Development and Deployment

Keywords play a vital role in search engine optimization (SEO), and — if used properly — have the potential to increase the flow of traffic to your site. It is beneficial to maintain an active list of keywords for each of your websites. Each list should be a continually evolving set of important, relevant keywords. The idea here is to develop a consistent practice of actively seeking better keywords, thereby producing your very own customized keyword library. Continue reading »

Optimize Convoluted Code via JavaScript

Search engines loathe crawling through convoluted lines of code. Oceans of complex JavaScript scare away the priceless indexing and archiving efforts of most major search engines, which will generally abort a crawl upon encountering such mess. The good news is that search engines actually do not deploy JavaScript, so it is possible to use JavaScript to hide those miles of messy code by using the fundamental document.write function. Continue reading »

Spamless Email Address via JavaScript

[ Mr. T ]

Let’s face it, spam sucks. Give spammers the figurative finger by using this nifty bit of JavaScript to hide your email address from the harvesters. Here is an easy copy-&-paste snippet for including a spam-proof email address in your web pages. Although there are a million ways of doing this, I am posting this for the record (and because I just can’t stand deleting usable code). This technique uses JavaScript, and therefore is not 100% ideal for all users. My […] Continue reading »

Stupid htaccess Tricks Redux

One of our most popular posts, Stupid htaccess Tricks, has been completely rewritten and now includes almost twice as many stupid htaccess tricks. Plus, we have added a library of regex character definitions, more information for many of the directives, and several handy references. But wait, there’s more — we even threw in a “quick-jump” Table of Contents and a complete set of “up” links [ ^ ] for easy navigation. Utterly amazing! Continue reading »

Back up that Database with phpMyAdmin

Optimal Database Export Options

Backing up your database as often as possible is essential. For WordPress, as well as for other applications, plugins and other scripts that help automate the task are easily obtainable. However, for several reasons, it is a good idea to understand the process of manually creating a backup copy of your database. This quick tutorial should help cement the process into a solid reference. We are assuming that you have an SQL database and have access via phpMyAdmin. Continue reading »

Website Attack Recovery

Recently, every website on our primary server was simultaneously attacked. The offending party indiscriminately replaced the contents of every index file, regardless of its extension or location, with a few vulgar lines of code, which indicated intention, identity, and influence. Apparently, the attack occurred via Germany, through a server at the University of Hamburg (uni-hamburg.de). This relatively minor attack resulted in several hours of valuable online education. In this article, it is our intention to share experience with website attack […] Continue reading »

Website Cluster Graphs

[ Perishable Press DOM Graph ]

Ever imagine your website represented as a cluster graph? Well prepare your DOM and check out Sala’s Websites as Graphs project. Just visit the free online tool and enter the URL of any web page. After a few moments, the site will generate a colorful graph such as the one displayed on the left of this post. Each generated map represents a single website page, where each dot represents a different tag, and each color represents a different type of […] Continue reading »

Permalink Enlightenment

I recently enabled the permalinks feature for a fresh WordPress 2.0.2 upgrade. The process required several hours of research and approximately 90 minutes to fully implement. This brief article summarizes the process and applies to the following setup: Continue reading »

Lightbox Notes

To add Lightbox functionality to any single image: Add rel="lightbox" to the anchor tag. Add a title="" attribute to the anchor tag. Add an alt="" attribute to the image tag. To add Lightbox functionality to any series of images: Add rel="lightbox[value]" to the anchor tag of each image. Add a title="" attribute to the anchor tag of each image. Add an alt="" attribute to the image tag of each image. Any set of pictures with the same rel="lightbox[value]" will display […] Continue reading »

WordPress RDF Source Makeover

I love looking at beautiful source-code output. However WordPress tends to spit code out in random chunks, often leaving spaces, line breaks, and tabs littered throughout the source output. This messes things up. Lists don’t look like lists and logically written code often appears scattered along the page carelessly. Often, this is the result of poorly written PHP, which can be manipulated to write beautifully aligned code that looks as good as it works. Continue reading »

Pipe Symbols

Useful reference for content creators working with code snippets: Name Symbol Code Broken pipe symbol ¦ ¦ Unbroken pipe symbol | | Continue reading »

WordPress Notes Plus

Welcome to Perishable Press! This article covers many different aspects of WordPress functionality, including customizing quicktags, deleting the cache, numbering comments & posts, changing password text, and displaying archive menus. Note that this article was written for previous versions (i.e., less than 2.0) of WordPress. Discrepancies may exist between the code presented in this post and that of more recent versions of WordPress. Nonetheless, this information is presented for references purposes with the hope that it will prove useful for […] Continue reading »

Stupid .htaccess Tricks

Welcome to Perishable Press! This article, Stupid .htaccess Tricks, covers just about every .htaccess “trick” in the book, and easily is the site’s most popular resource. I hope that you find it useful, and either way thank you for visiting :) In addition to this tutorial, you also may want to explore the growing .htaccess archive. Along with all things .htaccess, Perishable Press also focuses on HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, security, and just about every other aspect of web design, […] Continue reading »

Online Color Resources

Color References Colour Lovers Wikipedia Hex & RGB Color Names Wikipedia Color List Color Reference Link List Color Schemes Color Match Color Scheme Generator Color Combinations Color Combination Schemes Color Charts Color Charts by HTML Color Codes Visibone Color Charts December Color Shades December Color Shades and Codes Somacon – CSS Color Chart Jessey – CSS colors Color Codes Matching Chart HTML Color Pickers Dynamic Color Picker Firefox Extensions – Colorzilla Color Tools Meyer’s Color Blender Layout Color Changer Color […] Continue reading »

Welcome
Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience. Here you will find posts about web development, WordPress, security, and more »
Blackhole Pro: Trap bad bots in a virtual black hole.
Thoughts
I disabled AI in Google search results. It was making me lazy.
Went out walking today and soaked up some sunshine. It felt good.
I have an original box/packaging for 2010 iMac if anyone wants it free let me know.
Always ask AI to cite its sources. Also: “The Web” is not a valid answer.
All free plugins updated and ready for WP 6.6 dropping next week. Pro plugin updates in the works also complete :)
99% of video thumbnail/previews are pure cringe. Goofy faces = Clickbait.
RIP ICQ
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