Just another Freebytes.eu weblog

Tag Archives: PHP

Protect Your Site with a Blackhole for Bad Bots

One of my favorite security measures here at Perishable Press is the site’s virtual Blackhole trap for bad bots. The concept is simple: include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap, which then [...]

Shortcode for Includes

One thing that WordPress doesn’t have the ability to do “out-of-the-box” is do includes, in the sense of including the content of one post into the content of another post directly in the post editor. For the umpteenth time around here, shortcodes to the rescue! This issue came up while my co-worker Tim at Wufoo [...]

Show Post Thumbnails in Feeds

One of the nice things about using WordPress’ new post-thumbnails feature is that they provide tons of flexibility in terms of where and how you display your post thumbnails. By design, post thumbnails are not included within post content, so they will not be displayed in your blog posts unless you call them specifically with [...]

Specify Unique CSS File Per Post

I’m a HUGE fan of being able to link up a CSS file on a per-page basis. I just find it extremely common that a page needs CSS styling unique to it, and I hate litering a sites main stylesheet with customizations that only one particular page needs. We’ve talked about this before, and even [...]

Next/Previous Post Navigation Outside of the WordPress Loop

WordPress provides several navigational template tags to make it easy for visitors to surf your pages. There are basically two different types of template tags used for chronological post navigation:

posts_nav_link() – for navigating various archive (non-single) pages
previous_post_link() & next_post_link() – for navigating single-post pages

These template tags output the HTML markup required to create the actual [...]

Call a Widget with a Shortcode

We covered how to run a shortcode in a widget. But what about inserting a widget with a shortcode? I recently had this situation come up. I had a single page where I just wanted to be able to chuck in a widget without the whole rigmarole of creating a special widgetized area and probably [...]

Fixing WordPress Infinite Duplicate Content Issue

Jeff Morris recently demonstrated a potential issue with the way WordPress handles multipaged posts and comments. The issue involves WordPress’ inability to discern between multipaged posts and comments that actually exist and those that do not. By redirecting requests for nonexistent numbered pages to the original post, WordPress creates an infinite amount of duplicate content [...]

Remove/Replace Content from the WordPress Database

A useful tool to have in in your WordPress toolbelt is the ability to quickly and easily search for, find, and replace specific strings of text directly from the MySQL database. We can do this by entering SQL queries either directly or through one of those handy interface applications like phpMyAdmin, which seems like one [...]

Declare Multiple Widgetized Areas

Have a bunch of different areas you wish to declare as a widgetized area? Save repetative code by creating a quick array of their names, then loop through that array calling the register_sidebar() function on each one. Elementary PHP stuff here, but hey, it just saved me quite a few lines of code in a [...]

Is it Secret? Is it Safe?

Whenever I find myself working with PHP or messing around with server settings, I nearly always create a phpinfo.php file and place it in the root directory of whatever domain I happen to be working on. These types of informational files employ PHP’s handy phpinfo() function to display a concise summary of all of [...]