s2member notes
I use s2member (free version) and s2member Pro on a few of my sites. Have been for several years now. Over the course of time, I have amassed a healthy collection of notes, code snippets and techniques for customizing default functionality, adding features, and so forth. Gonna post the collection online for the benefit of any others who may be seeking for similar modifications and/or related information. Continue reading »
Block revslider Scans
One of the most annoying, persistent scans I’ve seen in a long time are those hunting for the revslider vulnerability. In the five or so months since the exploit was discovered, many sites have been compromised. And based on what I’ve been seeing in my traffic logs, the risk is far from over. Apparently every 2-bit script kiddie and their pet hamster wants a piece of the “revslider action”. Continue reading »
Protect Against Malicious POST Requests
Whether you like it or not, there are scripts and bots out there hammering away at your sites with endless HTTP “POST” requests. POST requests are sort of the opposite of GET requests. Instead of getting some resource or file from the server, data is being posted or sent to it. To illustrate, normal surfing around the Web involves your browser making series of GET requests for all the resources required for each web page. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, et […] Continue reading »
Testing HTTP Requests
Just a quick post with some tips for troubleshooting and testing HTTP requests. For example, if you have a plugin that sends requests behind the scenes via Ajax or cURL or whatever, it’s nice to have a way to view request details such as headers, the response, and everything in between. This article is aimed primarily at WordPress users, but contains more general tips and tricks as well. Continue reading »
Force Margin/Space Between List and Floated Image
If you’re displaying floated images in your posts, you may notice that margins of lists and other block-level elements seem to “collapse”, as shown in this screenshot from the 2013 redesign: Continue reading »
Slowing Down Movies in Quicktime
Just a quick post today.. Awhile ago I was putting together some video screencasts, and needed a way to “slow-down” the video to play certain sections at half-speed. After much trial and fiddling, here are the steps that actually worked to produce a saved copy of the movie (not just run the slow motion effect on the live movie). Continue reading »
List All Files and Folders Recursively via Terminal
From time to time I have occasion to generate a list all WordPress files or similar. As I’m not an expert in Terminal, it took awhile to figure out the magic recipe.. now having collected some useful commands, I want to post ‘em for future reference. Continue reading »
expose_php, Easter Eggs, and .htaccess
A reader recently brought to my attention a reported vulnerability on servers running PHP. It’s been known about for eons, but it’s new to me and it involves easter eggs in PHP so I thought it would be fun to share a quick post about what it is and how to prevent leakage of sensitive information about your server. It only takes a moment to disable the easter-egg information, should you decide to do so. Continue reading »
3D Text with CSS3 text-shadow
Here’s a fun way to make text look 3D using CSS3. Using CSS whenever possible instead of images has several key advantages, including faster page-loads and better SEO I use the CSS text-shadow technique in a previous theme, and a few people had asked about it, so here it is: everything you need to create your own stunning 3D-text with CSS3.. Continue reading »
Case-Insensitive RedirectMatch
Cool trick that you may not have known about.. it’s possible to get case-insensitive matching with the powerful RedirectMatch directive. Normally, you would just write your redirect as something like this: Continue reading »
Category Functions for WordPress
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 »
Dynamic Go-to-Top Link
Instead of displaying a perpetual “go to top” link for every page, here’s a quick way to dynamically display the link only if the content height is greater than that of the browser window. So it’s there when you need it, not when you don’t. Just include the following snippet of jQuery with your design: Continue reading »
jQuery Hover Swap Text
Things have been busy! I’m working on a new book and site and having a blast. I’ll share more on that later, but for now I just want to get back into posting at Perishable Press. To kick it into gear, here is one of the jQuery snippets I’m using at the new book site. Continue reading »
Optimizing WordPress Permalinks with htaccess
Okay, so Summer’s over, kids are back in school, and I’m finding all sorts of free time to continue writing and posting. One of my Summer projects involved updating & optimizing one of my old project sites, DeadLetterArt.com. It was basically a huge clean-up session that included lots of content consolidation and permalink restructuring. So that’s the topic of this post, how to use htaccess to optimize WordPress permalinks. I’ll go through some htaccess techniques and explain how they can […] Continue reading »
Huge Collection of Code Snippets: HTAccess, PHP, WordPress, jQuery, HTML, CSS
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 »
The Art & Science of Folding CSS Code
One of the joys of working with CSS is that you can basically write the code any way you want. Sure there are some basic rules you have to follow (like using brackets), but for the most part you can format your CSS code as elaborately or as plainly as you see fit. You can use this vast flexibility to improve the organization and usability of your working stylehseets before compressing them for production use. Continue reading »
