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.

» Read the full post

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

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

VWebhosting

So, to reiterate – the main server (Wist) will hold all my own stuff, then I’ll be creating a user Virtual Server (Wintermute) on top of that for users to play with and/or break. All the user stuff is backended in a Xoops database using Xoops groups.

Wist is installed with Debian Sarge using a custom kernel including the vserver patches from Debian. This sort of thing is detailed elsewhere so I won’t go over it again here.

The core server software (all from the Debian archive) will include: Apache 1.3 with PHP4, Apache-SSL, Bind, MySQL 4.1, Exim4, ClamAV and Dovecot (I’ll be detailing the email setup seperately) » Read the full post

Tags: Apache, code, Debian, Hosting, PHP