HTML Abbreviations Cheat Sheet
Here is my custom list of abbreviations for commonly used terms, as written via HTML’s <abbr></abbr> tag. I’m posting this to make it available to anyone who finds it useful. Very handy when writing tutorials related to WordPress, web design and development. A quick copy/paste is much quicker than typing it all out. Without further ado, here is my “cheat sheet” of HTML abbreviations. Continue reading »
All the Hyphens & Dashes
Typography is inspiring :) I recently posted about all the different HTML “X” characters. Then a tweet from Helge Klein inspired me to write a follow-up post showing all the different ways to write a dash or hyphen – character in HTML. Like most online content creators, I knew about – and —. But I didn’t realize there were so many other hyphen and dash characters. Continue reading »
All the X’s
This post explains all the different “x” characters currently available in HTML. It covers the various HTML entities and provides some examples and tips. Also explains the difference between the often confused “Multiplication X” and “Multiplication Sign”, and which is better for symmetrical buttons and links. Continue reading »
How to Fix _blank Target Vulnerability
In this article, I am reposting part of my recent tutorial, WordPress and the Blank Target Vulnerability. That post is aimed at WordPress specifically, however most of the article applies to HTML in general. So the tutorial below explains how to fix all “blank target” links, regardless of whether or not WordPress is involved. Continue reading »
WordPress and the Blank Target Vulnerability
For those who haven’t yet noticed, WordPress now adds rel="noopener" attributes for any external links added via the link Quicktag in the Visual/RTE. So if you enable the option, “Open link in a new tab”, WordPress automatically will add the rel noopener attribute to the link. This is to protect against CORS and other exploits that take advantage of blank-target links. It’s a smart move that may escape many in the WordPress community. So in an effort to help foster […] Continue reading »
bbPress Theme Template Files
For those getting into bbPress for hosting your own forum, customizing your bbPress theme files can be difficult if you don’t know which page to load. Many of the bbPress theme template files contain enough clues to figure things out, but not every template file is used by default, or even at all depending on how you’ve configured bbPress. Themes may contain different template files, but the default “bbPress (Twenty Ten)” theme (included with version 2.1.1) may be considered a […] Continue reading »
Encoding & Decoding PHP Code
There are many ways to encode and decode PHP code. From the perspective of site security, there are three PHP functions — str_rot13(), base64_encode(), and gzinflate — that are frequently used to obfuscate malicious strings of PHP code. For those involved in the securing of websites, understanding how these functions are used to encode and decode encrypted chunks of PHP data is critical to accurate monitoring and expedient attack recovery. Continue reading »
HTML5 Table Template
A good designer knows that tables should not be used for layout, but rather for displaying columns and rows of data. HTML enables the creation of well-structured, well-formatted tables, but they’re used infrequently enough to make remembering all of the different elements and attributes rather time-consuming and tedious. So to make things easier, here is a clean HTML5 template to speed-up development for your next project.. Continue reading »
Understanding CSS3 and CSS2.1 Border Properties
Even before CSS3 introduced a cornucopia of new border properties, CSS2.1 provided plenty of great functionality, enabling designers to style and enhance borders in many different ways. But now with the many new border properties available with CSS3, much more is possible, including everything from background border images, asymmetrical border radii, border transformations, custom fitting, and much more. While not every browser fully supports all of the awesome new styles, we can practice progressive enhancement to create beautiful, well-styled borders […] Continue reading »
Looking for a Publisher
After several months of working diligently behind the scenes, I am officially announcing my latest project: a new book on WordPress. Without giving away too much at this time, here are some facts about it: It’s focused on WordPress It’s co-authored between Chris Coyier and myself It’s going to be awesome Chris and I have been working on the book for several months now and are very pleased with the results. Both of us have some — albeit limited — […] Continue reading »
About Page Redux
Perishable Press provides high-quality, in-depth articles on web design and development, graphic design, social media, blogging, software, and more. Learn how to use WordPress, PHP, SQL, HTAccess, JavaScript, (X)HTML, and CSS to create beautiful sites that are usable, accessible, and secure. Good Day Sunshine Perishable Press is the virtual playground of Jeff Starr — visionary, founder and lead developer of Monzilla Media, a small web and graphic design company located in the lush desert oasis of Moses Lake, Washington. Perishable […] Continue reading »
Eight Ways to Block and Redirect with Apache’s mod_rewrite
With the imminent release of the next series of (4G) blacklist articles here at Perishable Press, now is the perfect time to examine eight of the most commonly employed blacklisting methods achieved with Apache’s incredible rewrite module, mod_rewrite. In addition to facilitating site security, the techniques presented in this article will improve your understanding of the different rewrite methods available with Apache mod_rewrite. Note: I changed the title of this post from “Eight Ways to Blacklist..” to “Eight Ways to […] Continue reading »
Custom OpenSearch for Your Website
I recently added OpenSearch functionality to Perishable Press. Now, OpenSearch-enabled browsers such as Firefox and IE 7 alert users with the option to customize their browser’s built-in search feature with an exclusive OpenSearch-powered search option for Perishable Press. The autodiscovery feature of supportive browsers detects the custom search protocol and enables users to easily add it to their collection of readily available site-specific search options. Now, users may search the entire Perishable Press domain with the click of a button. […] Continue reading »
Taking Advantage of the X-Robots Tag
Controlling the spidering, indexing and caching of your (X)HTML-based web pages is possible with meta robots directives such as these: <meta name="googlebot" content="index,archive,follow,noodp"/> <meta name="robots" content="all,index,follow"/> <meta name="msnbot" content="all,index,follow"/> I use these directives here at Perishable Press and they continue to serve me well for controlling how the “big bots”1 crawl and represent my (X)HTML-based content in search results. For other, non-(X)HTML types of content, however, using meta robots directives to control indexing and caching is not an option. An […] Continue reading »
Content Negotiation for XHTML Documents via PHP and htaccess
In this article, I discuss the different MIME types available for XHTML and explain a method for serving your documents with the optimal MIME type, depending on the capacity of the user agent. Using either htaccess or PHP for content negotiation, we can serve complete, standards-compliant markup for our document’s header information. This is especially helpful when dealing with Internet Explorer while serving a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1 along with the recommended XML declaration. According to the RFC standards1 produced […] Continue reading »
More Killer CSS Resets
Just a note to let everyone know that I have updated my previous CSS reference article, A Killer Collection of Global CSS Reset Styles. The updated version features two more excellent CSS resets, as well as the updated Meyer reset and a link to Eric’s official CSS Reset page. The two new reset styles are the Tripoli Reset and Tantek’s Reset. Continue reading »