Arricc

Wordpress Front Page Single Post

Well, I’ve rejigged my site theme, and I decided to play a bit with the layout.

The look of the site seemed to be better with just the excerpt from a single post on the front page.

Now, that sounds really straight forward and something that Wordpress should be able to do out of the box. And it is.

However, if you want the “Older Entries” pages to then show, say, 10 posts you’re knackered as all subsequent pages will just show 1 entry. I tried the Custom Post Limits plugin, but it still didn’t work as page 2 started at post 6.

After reading a lot of entries on this topic (it seems I’m not the only person keen on this!) and getting nowhere fast. Lots of “read this link then work it out yourself” type replies I finally got something to work. Using both the offset AND paging attributes of the query_posts() function!

The only issue with this is that the last page wouldn’t show at all. This was due to the fact that the front page misses all but 1 of the entries, then the 2nd page starts at entry 2. In effect you’re missing a number of entries up to the usual number per page minus 1 – everything that would be on the last page. To get round this, I simply double the number of entries displayed on what Wordpress believes is the final page.

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Tags: code, front page, PHP, Wordpress

Exchange Guid converter tool

In response to the amount of comments I’ve had (which are way way more than I was ever expecting!) on my Exchange Mailbox Recovery article, I’ve written a script to convert your guids from the bad format that exmerge gives you to the one thats required for updating the user account.

You can access it here. Please leave any feedback on this post.

Tags: code, Exchange, PHP, sysadmin

LastFM for Drupal

So, I’ve been playing with Drupal recently.

At first it did my head in, but then something sorta clicked. Not been near the Taxonomy module yet, but when I do I expect that process to reverse.

Anyway, I decided I needed a module that will allow users to show their LastFM stuff on their profile pages. I couldn’t find one so I wrote one.

I stared out with the Onlinestatus module as it did something very similar to what I was hoping to achieve.

Anyway, the module is attached should you feel so inclined. (Requires the profiles module I think. The one I based it on does anyway, so it probably does too.)

Download: lastfm.tar.gz

Tags: code, Drupal, lastfm, module, PHP

Photos in Active Directory

UPDATE:
The number one reason people come to this page is they want pictures in Outlook from the Global Address List.
It appears this is now possible using Outlook 2010 against Exchange 2010 as outlined by Ilse Van Criekinge in her Technet blog.

Here’s a couple of things I managed to cook up at work this week, again after spending an inordinate amount of time on Google looking for the answer and having to piece it together bit by bit.

The problem: how to store (and retrieve) staff photos in Active Directory. After the first twenty or so webpages I’d decided on using the jpegPhoto attribute. The secondary problem of getting the staff to submit to getting their pictures taken has already been solved by the new photopasses we’re all getting.
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Tags: Active Directory, code, sharepoint, vb.net, vbscript

User VHosting

So, previously, I detailed how to do web virtual hosting to directories on the file system. This is all well and good, but I want to have users pidgeon holed into their own directories, plus I want users own websites to be stored under their own directories in a similar format to that used in the previous article (eg. /home/user/web/example.org/subdomain)

The problem lies with mapping domain names (example.org) onto user accounts (Alice? Bob?). This is where Apache and mod_rewrite come to the rescue again. On Wintermute I’ve installed Apache 2, but this recipe will work just as well with Apache 1.3. » Read the full post

Tags: Apache, code, Debian, Hosting, PHP