Ryan’s Blog

Recently, I was asked to get a “snapshot” of the NTFS permissions on a Windows Server 2003, File and Print server. My boss simply wanted screen shots of everything, and I knew that would be rather useless. I wanted to have a file that could be used to actually enter the information into the system, if I ever had to rebuild this machine. After about 20 minutes of, “Right Click”, “Security” and copying down the permissions, I thought to myself, “There is no way in crap I’m going to do this on this entire directory tree.”

So, I was off to visit my good friend “Command Line” to see if I could get it to tell me what I wanted to know. After about half an hour of playing, I finally got what I wanted.

I found the command “cacls” which is a new one to me. You can use it to display the NTFS permissions on an object.

In my case, I wanted to show all the permissions, for every directory in a rather large tree, and dump the info into a text file. well, it’s as simple as:

cacls * > filename.txt

Viola! Enjoy.

The good folks at Disqus (http://www.disqus.com) have helped me resolve the issues with the changes to my post URL format.

If you manage any type of website with a discusion or comments section, I highly recomend you check out their solution. The big selling point for me was the user profiles, that allow you to follow a commenter from site to site. There are plenty of other great features, such as your usual ranking systems, spam management and many more. Go check them out.

When I reconfigured Wordpress, I forgot to customize the URL’s that it generates for my posts. I didn’t think it was a big deal, until now. I’m tired of seeing that ugly URL in the browser, as /?p=”postnumber” isn’t very friendly. Not to mention, it’s difficult to post links to particular posts on other websites or in emails.

Granted, anything can be turned into a hyperlink, but that’s not really the point. I love sending plain text emails and IMs, because they are easy to read on just about any device or client. There’s something I like about being able to see the URL and know exactly what it’s (supposedly) pointing to.

I wouldn’t think it would be a big deal, but a few of my posts are starting to get linked from outside sources, like other blogs. I don’t want to break these links, and just flat out change the way wordpress generates URLs. So, I think after this post, I’m going to try to change the way my future posts are stored.

Does anyone have any advice? I’m not keen on post numbers, obviously, and plain date stamps don’t do it for me either. I know Wordpress can link via the post title, but as the blog gets older, that’s going to get cumbersome. So perhaps maybe some hybrid of the two. /year/month/title maybe?

What schemes do you use on your sites?

*edit*

Apparently, WordPress is now smart enough to automatically create redirects when you change your permalinks structure. Sweet, eh? Problem solved.

Now, apparently I’ve broken the Disqus comments that were attached to the old URLs. Please forgive me while I try to correct this.