Monthly Archives: March 2013

Change WordPress Permalink Structure

I recently wanted to change my permalink structure on this website, and was running into some problems. After switching from the defualt (p?=123 or whatever) every post and page would get a 404 error. I coudln’t figure out why this was happening, as my htaccess was correctly written to. Here are the steps I took to make it work on my site (requires ssh access to modify apache2). This works for Ubuntu Server 12.04.

  1. Install mod_rewrite to your webserver with this command: sudo a2enmod rewrite . Now restart the apache2 service: sudo service apache2 restart .
  2. Change your permalink structure in WordPress (Settings -> Permalinks).

Now it should work, it really is that simple. If you have any problems, please leave a comment below. All of the guides I followed forgot to mention the mod_rewrite in Apache. Hopefully this helps some of you out.

Open source Craigslist clone

logo

A few days ago I had the urge to start a new project aimed at college students. I recall hearing someone say that they wished there was a place for them to find people to “hook-up” with on campus. That got me thinking about Craigslist, but with a twist. Instead of the site being devoted to a geographical location such as a city, my site would be targeted at a specific campus. Once I got the initial idea I had to find some software to implement (why reinvent the wheel?). I tried a few different “Craigslist clone scripts” and the like, but none of them offered what I was looking for. I needed the site to be simple and clean, but also easily manageable. After searching for a few hours I came across OSClass.

If WordPress’ admin UI is a 8/10 in terms of look and functionality, OSClass’ would be a 9 or 10. It is simply fantastic.You can control everything from the easy to use control panel that is very intuitive. So far I haven’t done much more work with the idea, and probably never will. But I was able to tinker around with some cool software, and maybe one day I will implement it for my campus. All I would need to do at this point is buy a domain name (I don’t feel like using a subdomain of willstare.com) and away I will go. I don’t know how much demand there would be for such a site, but people usually have a way of finding innovative uses for things given the opportunity to use it.

So go check out OSClass, you will be very impressed.

osclass front
Main page of my OSClass site.

management 1 osclass
Main dashboard page in the admin panel.

oc class statistics
Some statistics and graphs about the site.

Track blog views with the Top 10 plugin

I was searching for a plugin to use that would count views per post on my site. After trying a couple different plugins, I found the Top 10 plugin which allows for tracking of views per post and page, as well as daily and lifetime views. I like statistics, so it will be fun to see which posts garner the most views. I have a feeling that it will be my MW2 tutorials, as those were linked to from a few websites I used to be a part of.