Corey Salzano

Author: corey

  • Hide posts from WP home page

    Hiding posts from showing up on the home page is something I have been thinking about all week. Last night I finally dug into the WP Codex and figured out how to make it happen. Hide WordPress posts from appearing on your home page by adding their post IDs to the following array (where you…

  • Display WP Post Category without link

    Here is a small piece of code that will display the category name of a WordPress post without a hyperlink to the category page. Typically, the category data is retrieved with the_category( ). This function is not useful for manipulating the category name in plain text. Displaying the category in plain text is easy with…

  • How to: Stop Spam on your MediaWiki website

    This past week I deleted a few hundred wiki pages and user accounts from the MediaWiki installation our company uses to track software features and technical issues. Here is how you can stop your public MediaWiki website from becoming the victim of relentless spam bots. Limit exposure My wiki was operating smoothly for about a…

  • How to Block Java user-agents

    A variety of user-agents that begin with “Java” are likely visiting your website. Visits providing this type of user-agent are programs created in Java by developers who did not choose to change the default user-agent string value. Here is a list of the Java user-agents I have encountered: Java/1.4.1_04 Java/1.5.0_02 Java/1.5.0_06 Java/1.5.0_14 Java/1.6.0_02 Java/1.6.0_03 Java/1.6.0_04…

  • WordPress latest twitter sidebar widget

    Discontinued! This plugin is dead, details here. I made a WordPress widget to display latest Twitter updates for any Twitter user in a WordPress website’s sidebar. A widget is activated just like a plugin on any “widget ready” theme and can be positioned within the sidebar using the drag and drop Widgets page in the…

  • PHP4 Friendly htmlspecialchars_decode

    I needed to use the PHP function htmlspecialchars_decode( ) for a WordPress widget I am making. This function is built into PHP versions 5.1.0 and greater and is used to convert special HTML entities to characters. As defined, htmlspecialchars_decode( ) is the opposite of htmlspecialchars( ). Someone named Thomas commented on the PHP man page…

  • WordPress recently updated pages or posts

    This WordPress plugin creates a list of links to the most recently updated pages and posts on any WP website. The following image is a screen shot of the widget output. I am running this widget on this website, so forget the screen shot. Look at the sidebar on this page and you will find…

  • No Blog Clients WordPress plugin

    I wrote a small WordPress plugin today to prevent these link elements from showing up in the header of my websites: <link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”WPURL/xmlrpc.php?rsd” /> <link rel=”wlwmanifest” type=”application/wlwmanifest+xml” href=”WPURL/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml” /> The first of these link elements instruct blog clients where to find the WordPress XML-RPC interface via really simple discovery (RSD). The second…

  • Blacklisting via Ionic’s Isapi Rewrite Filter

    In IIS, banning IP addresses from accessing a website is fairly easy. I rarely do this, however, because I prefer to use a combination of an IP address and a user agent string to identify bad bots that are likely scraping my content or attempting to harvest email addresses. I try to avoid blocking an…

  • Label tag width not working

    The <label> element will not accept a width value in FireFox, and I just spent way too long finding a workaround. The label element is used to associate a text label to a form control that does not automatically have a label. Short answer: float left makes width work on label elements. When assigning a…

  • eBay Vehicle Protection Program scam

    Update 4/13/2021 Do not contact me about classified ad scams. I can’t help you if you are inclined to believe that a stranger is going to ship you a vehicle for a great price. It’s a scam. I will not respond to your email. If I continue getting emails about this post, I’ll probably take…

  • Calculate days receivable

    The amount of time that elapses between a sale and receipt of payment for that sale provides information about the financial structure of a company, including how the company manages its receivables. Calculating days receivable, or the average number of days sales are outstanding, is easy now with this calculator: Days Receivable Calculator Days receivable…