wekadesign

If you’ve ever wondered why your plain text email message is randomly ignoring line breaks like \n or \r\n then you’re not alone. I regularly use PHPMailer to send off automated emails and usually in plain text to keep it simple.

What Outlook 2003 (and 2002 and 2007 versions apparently) likes to do is be super helpful and remove what it regards as extra line breaks. It won’t be consistent either within a single mail or across many but it will make the content difficult to read. What you thought would be new lines will now be joined up in places and it seems to happen more often the further through the content you go.

There don’t seem to be many fixes for this issue but there are a few work arounds to help out.

1. Turn off this “feature” in Outlook in the Tools»Options menu. Honestly I’m not sure what use it is anyway. Unfortunately you’d have to do this on all the recipient’s computers.
2. Use HTML in your email rather than plain text. Depending on your content and need for complete accuracy, perhaps more time than it’s worth.
3. Add twice the number of line breaks where you currently have them. This seems to help but now your email is rather full of white space and may be more difficult to read.

Other than changing email clients, which is pretty unlikely, that’s about it. If you know of other options to try and get Outlook to not remove line breaks, please leave a comment below. This Microsoft KB article explains which versions of Outlook are affected http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287816.

I’ve been looking around for some easy and open-source ways to handle database replication for a handful of small but important MySQL databases. A few options were viable but usually included too many config changes for things like creating a new database. DRDB on a Linux server seems to be one of the fastest and easiest methods to handle database synchronisation for DR purposes, so this is the subject of this post. The content is a combination of two main sources from Mark Schoonover and the Ubuntu server guide and the gotchas I found along the way.

This post will show you how to create two MySQL servers that automatically replicate all their databases using DRBD. With Heartbeat installed on a third machine you’ll have basic fail over protection as well (we’ll do this in another post). Only one of the database servers will be active at any one time. Read more »

I thought I’d make more use of WordPress on wekadesign.co.nz since it’s very powerful and apparently was recently voted top PHP based CMS ahead of Joomla and many other top-notch products. It’s ease-of-use and interface are all excellent and the massive user base and huge number of plugins make it very attractive for almost any web publishing.

After moving the small amount of static WekaDesign content into Pages, I copied a couple of files (index.php and .htaccess) from my WordPress folder (./blog) into the site root, changed the settings in WordPress (Settings»General»Blog Address) and viola, anyone going to www.wekadesign.co.nz, now hits WordPress. Good. Step one done.

Now to change the default landing page to be a static Page rather than the blog. Just as easy, visit Settings»Reading in WordPress and change the Front Page Displays option to be your Page. Excellent, now everyone lands at the the WordPress version of my static content. But how do you now send people to your old default blog page? You can use http://www.yoursite.co.nz/2009/ to target certain groups of content by date or category if you have Permalinks setup, but I couldn’t find the way that WP builds the default blog page.

It’s not obvious, but that 2nd option in Settings»Reading holds the key. The Posts Page option is asking you to select an existing WP Page that will act as a placeholder and be that default blog page. So, if you haven’t already, create a new Page with a suitable name. The name is important as that’s the URL everyone will use and see for your blog. So if you call the Page “peanut butter”, your blog page will now be http://www.yoursite.co.nz/peanut-butter/. It doesn’t matter what the content of the Page holds as no one will ever see it.

There is a slight “gotcha” with the Page names, in that any name being reused will work, but WP will append it with an incrementing number e.g. “peanut-butter-2″.

To finish off, just create a nice link on your site somewhere like the Sidebar to your default blog page.