John Kavanagh : Indie Web Developer

There may be many reasons why you would want to block a specific IP address from access your WordPress site, or any PHP-based website (there are methods to block IP addresses in all language-based websites but in WordPress you’re using PHP, and that’s what we’re focusing on here). The main reason you would want to block access, particularly with WordPress, is to stop comment spam, or the uninvited access of an ex-employer and/or general troublemaker. If it’s your website, then it’s your appanage to allow or block people from accessing it as you see fit.

Read more

Spam crawlers trawl the internet hopping from page to page, searching for unprotected email addresses in your source code. When they do find one, and even worse: if they do find your email address then you best hope you have good filtering because that email address will be squirrelled away and appear on thousands of spam mailing lists for literally years to come. I recently logged into an email account at HotPop that I abandoned almost five years ago just to discover that it was still being inundated with spam every day, even now.

Read more

Eight years ago when IE6 was released, the majority of websites were still single-colour, square-edged and table-based with the occasional hard-edged animated gif. Microsoft could be forgiven for not implementing transparency support for PNGs because at that time there was no need for it, and since the majority of people accessing the internet were sucking it through an asthmatic 56k dial-up modem, web developers couldn’t use the larger-file sizes in their sites anyway.

Times have changed since then but sadly IE6 still takes up enough of a market-share of browsers on-line that this incapability to render the transparent sections of PNGs is almost crippling. Below is a screen shot from a PNG-dependant website I developed last year part-way through it’s development: I’m only pleased it didn’t look worse in IE6 than just a simple transparency problem..!

Read more

Developing for Microsoft Internet Explorer is a chore for every client-side developer: IE6 was released almost eight years ago and although admittedly IE7 was a huge improvement and the release of IE8 promises to reduce the gap yet further between “proper CSS rendering” and the way Microsoft like to do things. However, for the foreseeable future it is still a very definite requirement that website should be cross-browser compatible. That doesn’t mean perfectly identical in every single way, but close enough, and ensuring that users of one browser don’t receive a significantly reduced experience compared to visitors using others.

Read more

With email’s trumping all other forms of communication for the vast majority of professionals, the ability to include a signature at the bottom of your emails is virtually mandatory: think of it as the heading paper you use when sending out official letters - people are more likely to take you seriously and it gives you an excellent opportunity to not only share all of your contact details with the reception, but also to emanate a further sense of professionalism.

It’s no secret that one of Gmail’s few shortcomings is the complete lack of any native support for HTML email signatures. All you get is a very basic and bland text-based signature:

Read more