The 404 Web
Over the years, I’ve changed thousands of URIs. Maybe hundreds of thousands if you count changing everything over from http:// to https://. It always feels kinda wrong to modify URIs. Maybe that comes with a basic understanding that Cool URIs don’t change. But I also understand that, in reality, URIs change constantly. It’s just the nature of the World Wide Web, an endless perpetually evolving flow of digital information, URLs and links included. As stated by the W3C: Continue reading »
My Shortlist for Managed VPS Hosting
I’ve been online since 1999. So 25+ years of finding and dealing with a wide variety of web hosts. While painful at times, this experience enables me to get out there and find better web hosting at the drop of a hat. It’s been a while since I’ve written about my web-hosting experiences, so this post is to share a recent foray into finding a solid managed-VPS solution in the year 2025. Shortcut: Not interested in the diatribe? Jump to […] Continue reading »
Blackhole for Bad Bots – Quick Start
Welcome to the Quick Start Guide for the standalone PHP version of Blackhole for Bad Bots. This post basically is a condensed summary of the original Blackhole tutorial. So if you are new to the concept of blocking bad bots, check out the original tutorial. Otherwise, for those that are familiar, the following guide should simplify things and help you get started with Blackhole as quickly as possible. Continue reading »
Tools to check your site’s health
Perishable Press is now over 12 years old. It is a lot of work keeping everything updated, maintained, and well-secured. Fortunately there are a gazillion free online tools for checking your site’s health. Everyone has their favorites. In this quick article, I share mine. Continue reading »
xy.css moved to Perishable Press
Recently I’ve been implementing SSL on my domains and have been streamlining and updating some projects along the way. Consolidating properties is a great way to simplify workflow and boost productivity, so I’ve went ahead and moved xyCSS from its own domain, xy.css, to its new home here at Perishable Press. Continue reading »
2013 User Agent Blacklist
The 2013 User Agent Blacklist blocks hundreds of the worst bots while ensuring open-access for normal traffic, major search engines (Google, Bing, et al), good browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, et al), and everyone else. Compared to blocking threats by IP, blocking by user-agent is more effective as a general security strategy. Although it’s trivial to spoof any user agent, many bad requests continue to report user-agent strings that are known to be associated with malicious activity. For example, the notorious […] Continue reading »
WP-Mix – A fresh mix of code snippets and tutorials
Wrapping up 2012, I finally launched xyCSS, which is all about responsive, grid-based design. To showcase xy.css, I used it to design WP-Mix.com, which also serves to house a growing collection of choice code snippets. Currently WP-Mix features over 100 snippets, tutorials, and other useful bits to help with WordPress development and web design in general. The topics are similar to those at Perishable Press (e.g., WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, etc.), but the posts are less-involved and aimed at intermediate […] Continue reading »
xy.css – Responsive Grid Design
For the past year or so, I’ve been heavy into responsive, grid-based design. In December, I “soft-launched” my new site, xyCSS with a simple tweet: Bringing it all together: https://perishablepress.com/xycss/ As implied (and explained), xy.css is a lightweight CSS template for creating semantic HTML5 designs on a responsive liquid matrix. Continue reading »
What I did in 2012
It’s been an amazing year across the board. Here is a quick recap of some of the things I did in 2012. I don’t keep a journal of every little detail, but here are some of the things I remember specifically setting out to do, sort of organized by month. So much more to report, these are just the highlights. Continue reading »
Notes on Switching Servers
Switching servers & migrating sites can be a HUGE deal (or not), depending on things like: Number of sites to transfer Size and complexity of sites Who is hosting your sites Experience I recently did this, switching from a 3-year run at ASO to my new home at Media Temple. Total of 24 properties, with WordPress running on around 10 sites. Past experience with VPS servers really had me paranoid about running out of memory. A few years ago, Perishable […] 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 more »
