Okay, there are plenty of places online with instructions on randomizing posts in WordPress; even WordPress tells how. But here's my version along with the code I used.

Basically, I randomized the loop, and this required replacing the standard loop like this:

Replace…

while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ... endwhile;

with…
$pdh_args = array( 'numberposts' => 30, 'orderby' => 'rand' ); $rand_posts = get_posts( $pdh_args ); foreach ( $rand_posts as $post ) : setup_postdata($post); ... endforeach;

That worked for me. (note: setup_postdata() prepares the $post array as if it had been part of a standard loop, and the code did not work without it)

The solution involves editing WordPress code. I'm not a fan of this and I wish there were another way, but if there is, I haven't found it.

This solution I discovered in a conversation that ericr23 had with himself.

Add this to sanitize_title_with_dashes in wp-include/formatting.php:

$title = preg_replace('/[“”‘’]/', '', $title); //delete curly quotes $title = preg_replace('/[–—]/', '-', $title); //en- and em-dash to hyphen

Permalinks sanitized! And we could all do with a little more sanitation, right? We could do with some more sanity too!

Right…I must have forgotten to install sendmail, because mail wasn't working for WordPress. First, to verify that sendmail wasn't working I ran this PHP script (thanks to phpeasystep.com)

<? // send e-mail to ... $to="me@localhost"; // Your subject $subject="Test"; // From $header="from: your name <your email>"; // Your message $message="Hello rn"; $message.="This is testrn"; $message.="Test again "; // send email $sentmail = mail($to,$subject,$message,$header); // if your email succesfully sent if($sentmail){ echo "Email Has Been Sent ."; } else { echo "Cannot Send Email "; } ?>

That confirmed it. And the fix was easy:

apt-get install sendmail
Doing this exposed a flaw in my hosts file and ZYXware.com had the answer

sudo gedit /etc/hosts
…
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.1.1 zyxware01.localdomain zyxware01
…
If you have a static IP you can replace 127.0.1.1 with your static IP.
…

So, now mail works from php and, more importantly, WordPress.

[EDIT]
Sheesh…Ubuntu is picky. Here's (almost) exactly what I have for the top half of my hosts file
127.0.0.1 myhostname localhost.localdomain localhost ::1 myhostname localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 127.0.1.1 myhostname 192.168.1.100 myhostname.mydomain.com

The spaces are actually tabs, I don't know if it matters.

I also don't know what is needed and what is not, but I mimicked this layout on a new server and it worked; the MTA blah-blah service no longer takes forever and sendmail works nice and quickly.
[/EDIT]

I couldn't embed thumbnail sizes on my new WordPress install on my new Ubuntu server; I could only embed the original size (which was 3072×2048). The options to embed other sizes were just grayed out. It turns out that the default LAMP install doesn't include php-gd, the graphics library that creates thumbnails. Well… I guess that's easy enough to fix:

apt-get install php5-gd

First, the CSS:
code { border:2px silver dotted; font-size:100%; line-height:100%; margin:0px auto 0px auto; max-height:450px; overflow:auto; padding:5px 5px 5px 5px; width:95%; display:block; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre; }

Then the Plugins…

Raw HTML capability by Janis Elsts
WP_CodeShield by Scott Sherrill-Mix

Wrap code section in…

[RAW]<code> … </code>[/RAW]

…and you're in business.

P.S. Incidentally, Jeff Atwood is the spiritual inspiration for the motto and title of this site, Everything is Crap. Years ago he helped me realize that all the code I ever wrote is crap and the best I can hope for is to make it less crappy as time goes by. Over time I've come to realize that most aspects of daily life are total crap as well, thus this blog was born.

After flirting with Windows as a WordPress server we've realized that, since we went to the trouble of learning Linux, it's now easier to use Linux. So, Everything is Crap is back to Ubuntu and it's delicious.

Would you like an Ubuntu? You might want some milk to help wash it down.

But, because Everything is Crap, Ubuntu has problems too. Specifically, the shiny and new Ubuntu 10.04 Server running on Hyper-V R2 is unusably slow. But, just on the console. Attaching via SSH works as quick as ever. Anyway, here's the fix:

edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf and add the following line:
blacklist vga16fb

This guy fixed the Ubuntu slow console frame buffer problem for Hyper-V and Ubuntu 10.04. Thanks guy!

I hit another snag moving WordPress to Windows 2003/IIS6; media uploads don't work. (Interestingly, this doesn't seem to be a problem with Windows 2008/IIS7.) The fix involves creating a temp folder, as Joseph Scott's blog explains:

• Edit upload_tmp_dir option in php.ini. In my case I created an uploads folder in the wwwroot: upload_tmp_dir = "c:inetpubwwwrootuploads"
• Create the c:inetpubwwwrootuploads folder and grant the IUSR full control of it
• Create the uploads folder in your wp-content folder, for me this was in c:inetpubwwwrootwordpress-trunkwp-contentsuploads, then grant the IUSR full control of it
• Restart the IIS service (to pick up the php.ini change)

That fixed the problem for me.

One of the most famous pains-in-the-neck associated with installing WordPress is getting the Apache mod_rewrite to work. It's not automatic. I've talked about mod_rewrite already in a previous post, but I recently moved to a Windows WordPress installation, and that changes things.

In Windows Server 2008/IIS7, WordPress tells you what you need to do. If you go to the Permalinks section of Settings in WordPress, and you try to change how your permalinks appear, then it tells you to copy and paste the code that it displays into your web.config file. This is great, and a really strong reason to upgrade to Windows Server 2008.

But, since this blog has no budget, we've had to make Windows Server 2003 work. KyleCaulfield.com has a page that explains everything that you have to do to get mod_rewrite working for Windows Server 2003/IIS6. Works for us!

Now that I know how to do it, I'm getting fed up with LAMP as a web platform. I much prefer Windows. (What can I say? I'm a Windows guy!) And I recently stumbled into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It makes installing WordPress embarrassingly simple. Just run the installer and it does everything for you. For instance: I made a website in IIS, then ran the installer and it…

• installed PHP,
• installed MySQL,
• installed WordPress,
• and installed a couple other bits and pieces for IIS.

From what I understand, it would have installed IIS if it wasn't already installed. And that's not all it installs either: Joomla, Umbraco, phpBB, DotNetNuke, MS SQL Express, and a lot of others. It's great and, more importantly, it works. With the Web Platform Installer I've gone from barely being able to get WordPress to work on Windows/IIS to stupidly simple installs that take about 5 minutes. Literally! It's great!