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Books Plugins Search Spring Sale! Save 30% on all books w/ code: PLANET24 Search Perishable Press Web Dev + WordPress + Security WP Themes In Depth : Build and sell awesome WordPress themes. Popular Posts 7G Firewall How to Block Bad Bots Blackhole for Bad Bots Stupid htaccess Tricks Stupid WordPress Tricks Better Robots.txt for WordPress WordPress Block Proxy Visits How to Redirect with mod_rewrite + More popular posts » 3 Ways to Disable WordPress XML-RPC for Better Security 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 » Custom Headers with Simple Download Counter WordPress Plugin Quick tip for my free WordPress plugin, Simple Download Counter. SDC is optimized for successful downloads in most server environments, but there always is an exception to the rule. For example, on some servers, a download’s content-length header may be calculated incorrectly for GZIP and possibly other file formats. This tutorial explains how to define your own headers for downloads when using Simple Download Counter, so you can dial in perfect downloads for any server configuration. Continue reading » 8G Firewall Addon: Protect Against Rogue PHP File Attacks 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 » Sync News Feeds on All Devices for Free with Inoreader There are plenty of ways to sync news feeds across all of your devices. There are free services, paid services, and even scripts that you can host on your server. This quick tutorial explains two ways to sync your feeds on any device. The first method uses the free service from Inoreader, which works via web browser on any device. And the second method combines Inoreader with the Reeder app for a better experience on macOS and iOS. Continue reading » Why Automated Phone Systems SUCK You’ve been there. You know what I’m talking about. Why do companies insist on making our lives difficult by implementing horrible automated phone systems? Continue reading » Camera Review: Nikon D5100 I’ve owned a Nikon D5100 digital camera since September of 2011. It’s my primary camera for experimentation and serious, even commercial expeditions. Even after 10+ years, the camera captures excellent 16-MP photos and crisp, clear 1080p video. This post provides a quick review of the Nikon D5100, along with some example photos and lens information. Continue reading » Wishlist for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom DLC A couple of years before it was released, I shared my wish list for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (aka BotW 2). The list included all sorts of things that I wanted to see in Tears of the Kingdom. Fast-forward to the much anticipated May 2023 release of Tears of the Kingdom — I was overjoyed to find that most of my wishes” came true. Apparently somebody at Nintendo is listening to user feedback, as the new game […] Continue reading » What Those Three Linux CPU Usage” Numbers Mean 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 » Get Yourself Some Backup Internet Service Providers As a full-time web developer and typical human being, I rely on the Internet for a great many things. So when the Internet is not available, my work (and play) comes to a grinding halt. Fortunately my primary ISP is pretty solid, but it still goes down every once in a while. So to maintain my workflow (and general sanity), having a backup Internet service provider is absolutely essential. Here’s one way to do it.. Continue reading » Online Tools for TraceroutePing Traceroute not working correctly via macOS Terminal app, which is how I’ve been doing it for years now. For some reason, the traces hang up and never complete for certain sites. After some time troubleshooting and not finding any solution, I decided to look for alternate ways of performing traceroutes and site pings. Fortunately there are tons of free tools. Here are some of the useful services and apps that I’ve found.. Continue reading » WordPress pre_get_posts + Combined Category Archives This is a quick post following from the latest redesign of my WordPress plugins website, Plugin Planet. There, I make use of WordPress great query functionality to display archives of multiple categories. For example, here is the combined archive for BBQ Pro and Docs. So that category archive displays all documentation posts for BBQ Pro. Likewise for other categories, for example here is the combined archive for Banhammer Pro and Tutorials. That category archive displays all tutorial posts for Banhammer […] Continue reading » Heavy Scans for Low-Hanging Fruit I’ve been working on developing the 8G Firewall. Digging through log files and crunching the data, the big new trend I’m noticing is heavy scanning for easy targets, low hanging fruit. Bad actors are looking for any little hidden files stashed on your server. Mostly PHP files, also ZIP and RAR files, and other file formats commonly used for compressing and archiving content. Basically, anything that might contain useful information (like login credentials, database backups, email addresses, etc.). Also, 99% […] Continue reading » BBQ Firewall – Count Blocked Requests BBQ Firewall is built to be powerful, lightweight, fast and flexible. It’s code base is kept super lean, leaving extra functionality out of core while supporting new features via simple addons. For example, this tutorial shows how to use an addon to display the total number of blocked HTTP requests on the plugin settings page. This can help you get a basic idea of the plugin’s effectiveness. Continue reading » Enable Contact Form 7 to Work with Disable WP REST API My free WordPress plugin, Disable WP REST API, disables the REST API for all users who are not logged in to WordPress. So if you’re using a plugin such as Contact Form 7 that requires the REST API, it’s not going to work if Disable WP REST API is active on site. But there is a way to make it work. This quick tutorial explains how to set it up in two steps. Continue reading » Enable Logging for nG Firewall This tutorial is for users of my nG Firewall, version 8G or better. It explains how to enable logging for all blocked requests. This is useful for testing, debugging, and keeping an eye on things. Takes only a few minutes to set up, and of course it’s all open source and 100% free for everyone :) Continue reading » 8G Firewall After more than a year of beta testing, 8G Firewall is ready for use on production sites. So you can benefit from the powerful protection provided by the latest evolution of the nG Firewall (aka nG Blacklist). The 8G Firewall offers lightweight, server-level protection against a wide range of malicious requests, bad bots, automated attacks, spam, and many other types of threats and nonsense. 8G is a lightweight (only 17KB) strong firewall that provides site security and peace of mind. […] Continue reading » 1 2 3 … 60 • Previous Posts » Welcome Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of...