Perishable Press

It’s been awhile since my last personal news post, and I figure that enough has been happening to warrant yet another exciting news update. Yay! ;)

So let’s see, first on my mind is the recent launch of the new design for Monzilla Media, the official site for my personal website and graphic design business. The first two versions of the site were single-page brochure sites, but this new version is fully loaded, featuring tons of portfolio content, business news, and service information. If you’ve got a minute, I would love to hear your feedback!

Speaking of new sites, another one of my recent projects, mindfeed.org, is online and slowly growing in terms of both content and traffic. mindfeed.org explores some of the more philosophical ideas that don’t seem to fit well here at Perishable Press. I love to write about perception, relativism, conspiracy, religion, politics, and all of that fun stuff. If any of that’s your cup of tea, I encourage you to drop in an check out my recent article on interpretive reconnaissance.

Also on the site front, there has been a lot of new activity with the Dead Letter Art collective. We have a new issue of DLa currently available on lulu.com, and are giving away free issues of the promotional version of the issue (while supplies last). I am really proud of the new edition; it is 128 pages of pure, esoterically creative bliss, printed in full color and pefectly bound to make it all sweet. To further elaborate the event, I am posting a series of articles covering the entire process of creating the issue.

With all of this activity requiring every ounce of mental energy, I am planning two weeks of offline vacation time beginning on the 21st of this month. As announced a few weeks ago, I am in need of guest posts during those two weeks. At this time, there is still plenty of opportunity to share your work with the Perishable Press audience. I am accepting submissions until Wednesday the 20th, so if you have been thinking about expanding your sphere of influence, now is the time.

As part of my “get-the-hell-away-from-my-computer” vacation, I will be traveling to Portland to attend the 2008 PDX Zine Symposium (and share some issues of the new DLa!), spending some time in Spokane visiting my family, and probably doing some heavy chilling right here in the lush wasteland of the Desert Oasis. I do plan on twittering throughout most of the hiatus, so if you need to get ahold of me for some reason, hit Perishable on Twitter.

Finally, returning to Perishable Press for a moment, I have some great content lined up for the coming weeks, including a special guest post by Michael Roach on the potential downsides of social networking; an exclusive interview with SEOBook.com’s Aaron Wall; fresh articles on WordPress, HTAccess, and PHP, and even a new Blacklist Candidate Article. Sound good? Grab the Perishable Press Feed and join the fun! ;)

That’s all for this exciting news update — we now return to our regularly scheduled programming..

For on-demand printing of books, calendars, and other desktop-published items, lulu.com is a popular choice. The on-demand service provides customers with online administration interface that provides automated tools for uploading, publishing, and managing their projects. Once published, books may be printed, purchased, downloaded, and/or distributed. Of course, the entire process of using lulu.com to publish and print projects is fairly complex, with many details contingent on your specific needs. As a recent customer of lulu.com, I thought I would share a bit of DIY wisdom for anyone considering using their on-demand printing service.

Tip #1: Read the FAQs before planning your project

If you are planning on using lulu.com to print your next book, begin by reading through all of the relevant FAQs available at their site. Not all of them will apply to your specific project, but you should read through the entire process, even if you have yet to plan for the details. Depending on your project, you will find important information regarding just about every step of the self-publishing process. I suggest taking notes or bookmarking key pages as you read through the documents. This is important because there is a significant amount of topical redundancy throughout the lulu.com documentation, with conflicting information provided in different locations. With these discrepancies noted or bookmarked, you will be better equipped to extract information from the “Live Help” support staff.

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Hmmm.. Let’s see here. Google can do it. MSN/Live can do it. Even Ask can do it. So why oh why can’t Yahoo’s grubby Slurp crawler manage to adhere to robots.txt crawl directives? Just when I thought Yahoo! finally figured it out, I discover more Slurp tracks in my Blackhole trap for bad spiders:

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In my previous article on redirecting 404 requests for favicon files, I presented an HTAccess technique for redirecting all requests for nonexistent favicon.ico files to the actual file located in the site’s web-accessible root directory:

# REDIRECT FAVICONZ
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} favicon.ico [NC]
 RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.tld/favicon.ico [R=301,L] 
</ifmodule>

As discussed in the article, this code is already in effect here at Perishable Press, as may be seen by clicking on any of the following links:

• http://perishablepress.com/press/favicon.ico
• http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/06/12/favicon.ico
• http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/09/25/absolute…css/favicon.ico

Clearly, none of these URL requests target the “real” favicon.ico file, yet thanks to the previous method they are all happily redirected to the proper location. This is useful for a variety of reasons, including preventing excessive and unnecessary server strain due to malicious scripts.

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For the last several months, I have been seeing an increasing number of 404 errors requesting “favicon.ico” appended onto various URLs:

http://perishablepress.com/press/favicon.ico
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/06/12/favicon.ico
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/09/25/absolute-horizontal-and-vertical-centering-via-css/favicon.ico
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/08/01/temporary-site-redirect-for-visitors-during-site-updates/favicon.ico
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/01/16/maximum-and-minimum-height-and-width-in-internet-explorer/favicon.ico

When these errors first began appearing in the logs several months ago, I didn’t think too much of it — “just another idiot who can’t find my site’s favicon..” As time went on, however, the frequency and variety of these misdirected requests continued to increase. A bit frustrating perhaps, but not serious enough to justify immediate action. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? The idiot might actually find the blasted thing? Wouldn’t that be nice..

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Authenticate Lite is a follow-up version of the original Authenticate custom-content plugin for WordPress. Just as with the full version of Authenticate, Authenticate Lite enables universal and/or targeted inclusion of custom content for both feeds and posts. Ideal for adding copyright information, distribution policy, thank-you messages, custom links, special offers, etc. Custom content may be added to any location within posts or feeds — before, after, or even within post content. This highly flexible content-addition plugin works great on all 2+ versions of WordPress (i.e., 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5+).

Usage examples include:

• Selective display of targeted advertisements
• Invite readers to take advantage of special offers
• Add a copyright message or feed distribution policy
• Include universal footer content for all feed content
• Include universal footer content for all single-view posts
• Improve the brand awareness of your site by adding a custom site logo
• Add custom messages targeting site visitors, feed subscribers, or both
• Send unique “thank-you” messages to subscribers and visitors
• Spice things up by displaying a periodically updated thumbnail or banner image
• Selectively include links and other information for a targeted collection of posts
• Anything! This plugin provides an easy, versatile way to add custom footer content
• Implement a plagiarism-detection string in all of your content for easy identification

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Most WordPress-powered blogs display posts in sequential order within a single column. Like this, for example (note: I don’t know how well the <pre> formatting will be preserved in your feed reader — please check original post for clarity):

<!-- sidebar --> <!-- post #1 --> <!-- sidebar -->
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.        <!-- post #2 -->	  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.        <!-- post #3 -->	  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.        <!-- post #4 -->	  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
	.		 .		  .
<!-- sidebar --> <!-- post #5 --> <!-- sidebar -->

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While writing my previous article on creating the perfect WordPress title tags, I deliberately avoided discussing the use of separators in titles. I feel that the topic is worthy of its own article, enabling a more thorough exploration of the details. Title separators are the symbols, punctuation, and other characters used to distinguish between various parts of the page title. For example, a title may include the blog name, post title and blog description, with each element separated by a hyphen. Any Google search will reveal that some of the most commonly used title separators include the hyphen, the dash, and angled quotes. Many others are used as well, and we will explore some of them in this article.

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Note: This information is intended primarily for WordPress versions previous to 2.3, but may be applicable in other versions as well.

For those of you running an older version of WordPress that is generating errors such as:

Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067

You can easily resolve the issue by suppressing these errors, which are automatically generated whenever the parse_url() function tries to parse an empty value for the URL. To silence the errors, open the file wp-includes/functions.php and locate the following code (around line #1067):

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After much deliberation, I have decided to take a short vacation away from the computer. I have been working like a dog recently, and feel that a change of pace would help recharge the ‘ol brain cells. I haven’t decided exactly when it will be, but I am thinking that some time off in August (my favorite month) would be swell. Maybe go to the coast, do some traveling, take a long nap, or whatever. Technically, I haven’t taken a break from blogging here at Perishable Press in almost three years! So it’s definitely time..

Generally, I like to post three or four times a week, depending on my schedule. As most of you know, I like to post quality articles on just about anything related to Web development, graphic design, blogging, social media, SEO, site security, and just about anything related to technology, creativity, and design. Given a two-week hiatus, I am asking for help with around seven or eight guest posts, preferably from a few different authors.

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As my browser of choice, Firefox provides all the functionality I need for web design, application development, everyday surfing, and much more. With a handful of choice extensions installed, Firefox is a lean, mean “get-it-done” machine. Plus, I am always looking for new ways to boost productivity and increase efficiency. Of course, an excellent way to do this involves learning and using as many mouse and keyboard shortcuts as possible. Over the past few years, I have collected oodles of shortcut snippets for Firefox. Thus, in an effort to purge my constantly growing stash of notes, I decided to round up all of the Firefox shortcuts I could find, clean them up a bit, and post the collection online for everyone to enjoy. Drum roll please: now presenting 85 Firefox Shortcuts for Mac and PC! Enjoy..

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