Simple Download Counter (SDC) version 2.3 features a very basic API that returns the number of times a specified file has been downloaded. For lack of a better name, I call it the “Micro API”. This tutorial explains how it works, and provides a real-world example showing how to use it. Continue reading »
There are many ways to do this. I wanted the quickest and easiest. I run Yourls on several sites to create shortlinks for my books. Each instance of Yourls contains many URLs. I like to keep my books current. URLs tend to change and break over time. It is a chore to check 800+ links in each of my books, page after page. So I wanted a quick way to check for 404 and other broken links. In this post, […] Continue reading »
Here is a simple blank (empty) .htaccess file, ready for download. Continue reading »
For those who know, YOURLS makes it super easy to host your own URL shortening service. I use Yourls on several sites and it works great at generating shortlinks for otherwise long and tedious URLs. So they’re easier to share, remember, social media, etc. Yourls is developed by a well-respected developer and is 100% FREE and open source for everyone. It’s a truly great app and highly recommended. Continue reading »
I like to read. All sorts of stuff. Especially social media posts. I can sit for hours scrolling thru threads, but it gets annoying when there is someone spamming or pushing an agenda, or just being stupid in general. So I looked back my notes and remembered that most browsers can be customized with user-defined stylesheets. This tutorial explains an easy way to use your own custom CSS to block unwanted content on any website. It works without requiring logging […] Continue reading »
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 »
So yesterday I got a new phone and could not log in to my account at WordPress.org. Why? Because I had enabled Two-factor authentication (2FA) on my account as an extra layer of security. I had been completing this 2FA step on my old phone using the Google Authenticator app, which works great. The problem is that I had not yet transferred my Authenticator codes to my new phone. So when I tried to log in to my WordPress.org account, […] Continue reading »
Was thinking of the things that are absolutely essential for my line of work, at least for my own operation working with WordPress and web development. Not so much the technical and code side of things, but more of the “meta” or “big picture” type of stuff. Some are simple and others require a bit of explanation. Some are specific to working on the Web, and some probably would apply to any line of work. But I am a web […] Continue reading »
Lately my some of my WordPress-powered sites have been hit with a very specific brand of comment spam, which may be referred to as “darknet market spam”. The spam is simple but persistent. And there’s a LOT of it. Very annoying. Fortunately it is trivial to stop. Here are a few ways to block teh darknet market spam.. Continue reading »
More than you might think, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) bots are crawling your site and scraping your content. They are collecting and using your data to train software like ChatGPT, OpenAI, DeepSeek, and thousands of other AI creations. Whether you or anyone approves of all this is not my concern for this post. The focus of this post is aimed at website owners who want to stop AI bots from crawling their web pages, as much as […] Continue reading »
Pleased to announce a new update for my pet project, Wutsearch, a search launchpad that puts all of the best search engines on one page. So you can easily search your favorite engines with a few clicks. I use Wutsearch as my personal homepage on my local devices. It is lightweight, fully customizable, with no ads and is free forever. This year celebrates Wutsearch’s 5th year in service. Continue reading »
Good news! The 8G Firewall is updated to version 1.4. This latest update resolves numerous false positives and bugs that have been reported since version 1.3, when 8G was taken out of beta and officially launched last year. Continue reading »
I enjoy sharing the pathetic phishing emails that make it past my spam filters. After watching various waves of phishing campaigns come and go over the past 20 years, I have come to accept that it’s just a part of life on the Web. Phishing scams have been happening since the dawn of the Internet, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. About the best you can do is practice safe email handling practices and never open any links or […] Continue reading »
I’ve written before about how to protect WordPress XML-RPC and why it’s important. In this quick post, I explain three easy ways to to disable WordPress XML-RPC to help improve the security of your WordPress-powered site. Continue reading »
Been getting hit with massive attacks on all sites. Very large VPN/proxy network. Relentless requests 24/7, thousands of requests every minute, just non-stop attacks. All URL requests targeting rogue PHP files. The attacks were weighing on precious server resources. Server held up fine but this nonsense needed to stop. So I wrote a tight little addon for my 8G Firewall. Blocks the entire attack with just a few clicks.. Continue reading »
Just a quick note to self (and anyone looking for the same information). A common question I get for my free WordPress plugin, Dashboard Widgets Suite (DWS), is “what do the CPU Usage” numbers mean? Users get curious because the DWS plugin displays something like this on the WordPress Dashboard: Displaying CPU Usage and other stats on the WP Dashboard (click image for full-size view) Notice in the screenshot, where it shows the three numbers for “CPU Usage”: 0.75, 0.55, […] 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 »
