Sitting at the kitchen table last night, I got tempted and hit the “change permalinks” button that is on the page where you create and edit your blog posts.  It worked out pretty well, I thought.  Then I tried to view my post – *bam* – every link on this site had been broken.  It took me twenty minutes of frantic searching that allowed me to find not only numerous plugins for WordPress that allow for redirection when you change your permalink layout, but the “permalink” options hidden under “settings” on the Dashboard page.  Sigh, crisis averted.

But now I really want to get back to those pretty permalinks.  If you click on the title of this blog entry, you’ll see it takes you www.teamjuchems.com/?p=178.  That’s lame when you consider it could be something cool like www.teamjuchems.com/2009/09/pretty-permalink-google-analytics (how much more awesome is that! ;))  This also allows your site to score better when indexed by Google, Bing, etc.  Anyway, it is a little more involved than just hitting that “Change Permalinks” button.  The only major task from that list that I have gotten done is to enable mod_rewrite in Apache, done via webmin.   I am not quite sure how to do the other bits, but I am guessing I will learn shortly.  The nice thing about self hosting this blog is that I am root and therefore can do everything myself and not hope that a provider will let me mess with settings.  Instant gratification (and site hosing) for the win.

Next up was getting Google Analytics tied into this site.  This was really easy, use your gmail account to login to www.google.com/analytics and get your ID.  Install and activate one of the numerous plugins that add the code for you (the one I used had been installed some 500,000 times, which is the highest number on a plugin that I have seen so far) and plug in that ID number.  Wait until Google crawls your site and its done.   And now I can see if people actually come to this site 😉

Finally, I realized that before making major changes (permalinks, new plugins, etc.) I need to make a backup of what I have.   I have sunk too much time into this little adventure to let it get messed up by a stupid mistake I make.  At some point I might even build up a test system which is some scary IT thinking following me home…

–Nat

Something that has bothered me about this blogging setup since its inception was the need type “wordpress” at the end of my teamjuchems.com URL, https://www.teamjuchems.com/wordpress. Everyone else seems to have figured out how to get their blog into their root directory. I had setup my wordpress install into a “virtual” apache instance, so this wasn’t how it came up as default.

After trying to mess with an .htaccess file, redirects in Apache, etc. I scrolled down, in webmin, to the apache server management page, and guess what I saw:

As you can see there, there is a “root” directory. Previously it was pointed just to /var/www/, now it points to /var/www/wordpress/ and magically this made it so my blog was the root of the web server. Now, this broke a bunch of things and made it so I had to clear the cache of all my web browsers so I could login, but this should be its long term parking spot. I had also mistakenly told the virtual server that it was representing http://worpress.teamjuchems.com – this has now been fixed as well.

One win for the team, at least 😉

–Nat

So Windows 7 has a development environment (Integrated Scripting Environment) built in for PowerShell. That’s pretty freakin’ cool…

Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Windows PowerShell -> Windows PowerShell ISE

Remember that the Shell is capitalized 😉

And the awesomeness has just been tempered as I realize that I have PowerShell V2 with the included ISE – but the only way to get this is to run Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2. I was hoping to get this up and romping at work, but evidently I’ll have to wait. As in “a few months.” Seems pretty ridiculous, you would think that Vista and 2008 would have support at the same time…  I was really hoping to do my VMware backups with this tool.  It’s still possible, I suppose, just a little more difficult.  Dang it.

This came out last December but appears to be the best MS can do for my 2008 Server  development box.  That’s a bit of a downer.

Still, it looks promising 🙂

–Nat