Adding Blog as a Menu Item in WordPress

On my personal blog, I set the main page to a static page. However, I also wanted a menu item to the blog posts. There was nothing in the Menu editor, but the solution is quite easy if you know how.

  1. Create and publish an empty page. I called mine “Blog”.
  2. In (Dashboard) -> Settings -> Reading, there is a drop down called “Posts page”. Select the empty page you just created. Save your changes.
  3. Under Appearance -> Menu add the Posts page to your menu. Save the menu.

When you now click on this menu item (or navigate to the page some other way) it will show the blog posts list as normal.

Apache: How To Redirect http to https

If you want to direct traffic from your http so that it gets encrypted, this is really easy to do in Apache:

Step one: Set up your https vhost:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost 10.1.1.1:443>
DocumentRoot /var/www
# other server options go here as needed
# – logging for example
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/example.cert
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/example.key
# Add other SSL specific options as needed</pre>
</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

Step two: Set up your http vhost:

<VirtualHost 10.1.1.1:80>
ServerName my.example.com
RedirectPermanent / https://my.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

We have previously posted more information on enabling SSL in Apache.

Obviously, instead of 10.1.1.1 and my.example.com you’ll have to use your own IP and hostname, whatever they may be.

Note that this will redirect everything from http to https. Finer control is possible, for example you could do:

RedirectPermanent /secure/ https://my.example.com/secure/

Or you could use RewriteRules for even more control. However, in the age of mass surveillance and constant threats from hackers, a general redirect to https is a good idea.

Could not perform immediate configuration on ‘python-minimal’

When I tried to update my Debian box, I got the following ominous error:

E: Could not perform immediate configuration on ‘python-minimal’.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2)

It turns out that the fix is fairly simple. The following worked for me:

apt-get install -o APT::Immediate-Configure=false -f apt python-minimal

Creating New Outlook .PST Files in Office 2010

Back in the good old days, I am pretty sure, all the PST related stuff was in the normal file menu. Not anymore. I wanted to create a new PST file and I had to look quite a while before I found it – Microsoft has it hidden quite well:

It’s in the Home ribbon, under “New Items -> More Items -> Outlook Data File”.

I never liked those Ribbons, but anyway, maybe this will save someone else ten minutes.