![[ 6G Blacklist (beta) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/6G-Blacklist.png)
Since releasing the 5G Blacklist earlier this year, malicious server scans and bad requests have surged with more novel attacks than I’ve seen since first getting into this stuff six years ago. In other words, now is the time to beef up security and lock things down. If you’re into monitoring your server and knowing your traffic, you may be observing the same recent spike in malicious activity. In response to these attacks, I’ve been secretly working on the next […] Continue reading »
Ill requests and malicious scans have been spiking recently, to the point where server performance was really taking a hit. One scan in particular hammered the server with thousands of bad requests in just a few minutes. There are people out there with strong scripts and small minds that are constantly scanning sites for vulnerabilities, and much of what I’ve seen is aimed primarily at WordPress. Continue reading »
![[ Downtown Seattle WA 2012 ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/wordpress-category-mods.jpg)
My previous theme sports the now-infamous colorized categories, which aim to help visitors navigate featured content. In addition to the colors, featured categories display contextually relevant navigation, popular posts, and related tags. It’s a great way to improve organization and get more of your content in front of the visitor. To make it happen, a variety of tasty WordPress code snippets are used, including versatile theme functions that enable getting the first category link, displaying sub-categories of the current category, […] Continue reading »
![[ WordPress Plugin: GA Google Analytics ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/ga-google-analytics.png)
I’ve joked that there a million different Google Analytics WordPress plugins available, but I’ve never been able to find one that’s just dead-simple, plug-n-play, and with clean code and markup, so I wrote my own that does just that: a no-frills way to add the new Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code to all pages on your WordPress-powered site. This analytics plugin is lightweight, fast, and now has over 50,000 80,000 active users via WordPress.org. Continue reading »
![[ PayPal Phishing Spam Email ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/paypal-phishing-spam-03.gif "Hover over the link and check the URL in the status bar")
Just a heads up to anyone else getting the occasional PayPal phishing spam.. Usually it’s pretty easy to spot one of those crafty phishing emails, just hover over any links before clicking to view the real URL in the status bar. You know, the link says something like, “click here to restore your PayPal account,” but you know that’s garbage and could easily prove it by checking the actual link URL, which is usually something completely bonkers, like: Continue reading »
![[ 5G (2012) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/5G-Blacklist-2012.png)
The 5G Blacklist helps reduce the number of malicious URL requests that hit your website. It’s one of many ways to improve the security of your site and protect against evil exploits, bad requests, and other nefarious garbage. If you’re tired of all the slow, bloated security plugins and expensive 3rd-party services, the 5G Blacklist is a solid solution to help protect your Apache-powered site. Continue reading »
![[ 5G (MS IIS) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2011/5G-firewall-microsoft.png)
By design the 5G Blacklist works on Apache servers, but thanks to Scott Stawarz, here is a version for Microsoft IIS. Disclaimer: I do not use any Microsoft server stuff, so make sure to properly test everything before running this code on a live/production site. Also, if you scroll down to the end of this article, you will find some useful bonus snippets. Continue reading »
Developing WordPress sites on a local MAMP server provides flexibility, privacy, and security throughout the development process. Setting up a WordPress environment on MAMP is definitely worth the effort, especially if you’re building and testing multiple sites using WordPress’ built-in MultiSite functionality. The easiest and recommended way of setting up WordPress MultiSite is to use sub-directories. So when you create a new site named “business”, it will be located at http://localhost/business/. Here’s a mini-tutorial on how to use sub-domains for […] Continue reading »
![[ Common Server Responses ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2011/relative-status-codes.gif)
Protecting your website is more important than ever. There are a million ways to do it, and this is one of them. In fact, it’s what I use to protect Perishable Press and other key sites. It’s called the 5G Blacklist, and it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time. The idea is simple enough: analyze bad requests and block them using a firewall/blacklist via .htaccess. Now in its 5th generation, the 5G Blacklist has evolved into a […] Continue reading »
![[ WP Cron HTTP Auth ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2011/code-snippets-collection.jpg)
Please excuse this self-serving, miscellaneous post, but I’ve just got to purge all of these code snippets and scraps collected over the years. Whenever I update this site, I place any removed/unused code snippets into a giant note file for future reference, just in case. There’s all sorts of different types of code and snippets that just keep growing and growing and.. and finally it gets to a point where I just need to dump everything and start fresh. Welcome […] Continue reading »
If you want to block tough proxies like hidemyass.com, my previously posted .htaccess methods won’t work. Those methods will block quite a bit of proxy visits to your site, but won’t work on the stealthier proxies. Fortunately, we can use a bit of PHP to keep them out. Continue reading »
![[ WordPress ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2011/wp-logo-small-blue.png)
In my previous post, I share my technique for Ajax-Powered Error Logs. That tutorial shows you how to set up dynamic error monitoring on any typical website, but the script requires some tweaking to get it working with WordPress. In this quick post, I explain how to set up Ajax Error Logs specifically for WordPress sites. Continue reading »
In this “WordPress 101” video tutorial, we look at WP’s Admin Dashboard. We’ll see how it works, what it can do, and how to customize and clean it up. Customizing the WordPress Dashboard is a great way to help boost productivity and streamline your experience working in the Admin Area. This video screencast shows you how to be a Dashboard Ninja in around six minutes. Continue reading »
In this “WordPress 101” video tutorial, we’re going to start with the basics and just log into the WordPress Admin Area. It’s exciting stuff to be sure, but there are many reasons why this kind of information makes for a better screencast than a written post. This video screencast is about three minutes and shows how to login to the Admin Area with WordPress version 3.1.2. The general technique should work with any version of WordPress. The video shows several […] Continue reading »
Welcome to the first video tutorial in my “WordPress 101” series. It’s simply called “Welcome” and is just a quick introduction to the series, why I’m doing it, about me, and so on. Note that there’s nothing happening on-screen in this screencast – just a simple welcome message ;) Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: Comment Spam in Moderation ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2011/spam-characters.gif)
Quick WordPress tip for easily and quietly blocking a ton of comment spam. Akismet and other programs are good at catching most spam, but every now and then a bunch of weird, foreign-language spam will sneak past the filters and post live to your site. Here’s a good example of the kind of stuff that’s easy to block: Continue reading »
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 