Category Archives: Blogging

WordPress Excerpt on Pages

WordPress is awesome, and I love it, but sometimes little things get taken out that frustrate me.  For example, in v3.1+ they removed the ability to add custom excerpts to pages.  This was a frustration for me, and I of course had to go out to Google to find how to make it work again.  That’s when I quickly found this nice post that clearly detailed how to add it back in.  Nice, easy to follow post with screenshots.  Nice work!

WP Super Cache Preload issues

I’ve been working on one of my other blogs trying to get the preload function working in WP Super Cache.  It seems pretty straight forward, but for some reason there are a couple of issues.

First, the timed preload of cache files does not seem to work reliably.  I had set it to 30 minutes with email notifications, and it would only go once, or twice at the most.  Beyond that it would just not do anything at all.  Once, I even turned off the scheduled preload and it did it anyway!

Secondly, even when doing a manual preload of the cache, the preloaded files get removed from the cache even though the description clearly indicates that supercache files from the preload will not be removed by the garbage collection.  I even went so far as to disable the GC with the same result.

I’ve created a forum post with the hopes of getting some help.  I’ll keep this updated as things hopefully progress…

WordPress nested shortcodes in custom fields

On my hobby blog PortlandBrewpubs.com I have a listing of all the brewpubs in the Portland area.  The list is pretty long (yes, its Beervana!) and quickly became a management headache to keep everything looking uniform.  I was looking around for way to standardize all my posts and ended up fixing up my own solution that was both free, and supportable as near as I can tell.

I started using Custom Fields in WordPress for all of the interesting bits of information in my posts to keep it standard.  I have one for all the useful Pub stats.  Street address, website, phone number, hours, etc.  This way I can fill in a value for each field and know I’m not missing anything.  I then use the very handy plugin Get Custom Field Values to display the fields in my Post.  In the beginning I had all the formatting for every post right in the post body.  This worked pretty well until I wanted to change the layout, at which time I realized it was a pain to update my site.  I would then have to go to every post and replace the body of the post content.  With over 40 pubs in town I didn’t want to have to do that every time.  I had to strategize a way to avoid this moving forward.

Continue reading WordPress nested shortcodes in custom fields

Exchange 2010 OAB Error

After our transition to Exchange 2010 most things were working as expected.  One thing that wasn’t was the OAB.  I did set it to the new generation as I was supposed to, but the clients were still not getting any updates.

After some hunting around the web I discovered that I also needed to update the distribution point from the virtual directory of the old 2007 server to the new 2010 server.  I hoped that this would fix it, but it did not.  It turns out that something I had set to make my life easier made my life harder!

I had setup folder redirection to point OWA access to https from http, as well as redirecting to /owa so that users would not have to remember everything in the url.  This was working but it broke the OAB delivery and gave an error 500.  It turns out that when you setup the redirection on the root folder in IIS7/7.5, and you then turn that off for the underlying virtual directories, IIS sets up a web.config file in every underlying directory.  You have to then go into the file structure on the server and allow ‘Authenticated Users’ read and read-execute permissions on that web.config file.  Once I had done this my OAB was then available and all the clients went and downloaded it.

 

Yet another one of the little gotchas that is not documented.

Exchange 2010 Transition from SBS 2008

I’ve been at my new job for two months now, and I already feel like I have tackled many things.  There is a long way to go yet, but the progress have been interesting.

One of the bigger projects I have been working on is getting away from Small Business Server 2008.  It is a great system for startups, but I’m pretty sure this place outgrew it about a year ago.  The server has 8gb of ram with just 1 (mirrored) HD, so it is paging like crazy and runs as slow as I have ever seen.  Here are some of the many tasks I’ve been doing recently to take some load off of it and get ready for the Exchange 2010 Transition from the Exchange 2007 that is included on SBS 2008.

* Raise the domain level to 2008

* Transfer FISMO roles to our new AD Controller

* Setup DNS on new AD Controller

* Replicate and Activate DHCP scope on new AD Controller

* Upgrade Exchange 2007 to SP3

All that just to get to a place I felt ready to start the new Exchange 2010 installation.   So far things have gone pretty well.  Having never worked with Exchange 2010 before I wanted to do a lot of reading before I started any work.  I reviewed many blog posts and forums and found lots of good information.  There was one site in particular that had an excellent step by step guide.  Exchange Geek’s Weblog had an excellent transition guide.  While it deals specifically with a transition from Exchange 2003 to 2010, I was most concerned with the Exchange 2010 setup and configuration tasks which are largely the same.   I was able to adapt the steps for Exchange 2007 and so far everything is working well.  I recommend downloading the guide and giving it a read.