The Surly Admin

Random Thoughts – Spiceworks, WordPress and more

Couple of random thoughts I wanted to write about on Spiceworks, WordPress and Powershell.org

WordPress

One major problem I’ve had with WordPress for awhile is the use of the sourcecode tag and scheduling posts.  What was happening to me was certain characters within the sourcecode tag’s where getting coverted into their HTML equivalents (essentially escape codes).  Since HTML uses these characters they had to come up with an escape code if you actually wanted to display that character, > for >, " for a double quote, etc.  If I just manually publish a post all of this works fine, but as soon as I schedule the post for publishing in the future all the characters get converted.  Major problem when I’m using HTML in my scripts, minor annoyance for most Powershell scripts.  The problem had gotten to the point that I stopped using the schedule feature altogether and just had to remember to wake up on my publishing days and manually publish that day’s post.

The other annoyance was I opened a thread on WordPress support that got ignored completely.  So I opened another one, which also got ignored.  Very frustrating.  Then I found another blogger who was having the same issue!  But about that same time I saw someone in the WordPress forums who had the ability to tag WordPress support staff, so I updated this guys post with the hopes that that person would see our dilema and flag WordPress support.  And TimeThief did see it and did flag it!  Within a day WordPress support was looking at the problem.

And today, January 1st, 2013 they updated the thread that they had fixed the problem!  I’ve scheduled my next post for 7am on Thursday (January 3rd) and am crossing my fingers that it will go ok!  I’ll let you know!

Linking to Spiceworks

As you know, I use Spiceworks as my script repository and it’s where I do most of my trolling for Powershell projects.  I’ve always assumed that any links I have into it would be readable, you just couldn’t do anything until you registered.  Today I actually tested it and found that you have to register in order to see anything.  Sorry about that.

All I can say at this point, is go ahead and register.  Spiceworks won’t SPAM you that much (maybe 1 or 2 emails a month) and if you’re an IT pro you can really learn a lot there, even if you work for a big Enterprise.  Registering is pretty easy too.

Is this a major problem for you?  Do I need to start a new repository?  Let me know.

Powershell.org

I don’t spend a lot of time on Powershell.org, but I wanted to talk a little bit about it here.  It really is a great resource for Powersheller’s, whether you’re just starting out or you are writing advanced scripts.  The forum is very active–in fact, that’s my main reason for not using it as much as I was getting flooded with stuff–so if you have a problem you can definitely get an answer there.  Of course, if you want to use the Spiceworks Powershell forum, I won’t stop you either!  Don Jones is the primary force–at least he’s the face–behind Powershell.org and I particularily like his e-book on HTML reporting here.  There’s also an interesting book on using SQL and SQL Reporting Services, but I tend to like my scripts more self contained but the potential is pretty cool.

Go check them out.  Don’t forget to add yourself to their People page, once you figure it out!  Here’s my profile.

Random Thoughts on Random Thoughts

To keep to some kind of publishing schedule, my original thought was to only have these Random Thought posts on Friday’s, but I decided I’m not going to stick to any schedule at all.  As the thought hits me, and if I feel like writing about it I will just do it and post whenever.

January 2, 2013 - Posted by Martin9700 | Random Thoughts | Powershell.org, spiceworks, Wordpress