Is there any way through Sharing Rules to exclude inactive contacts from being visible in the Customer Portal?

We are trying to add multiple mini-page layouts to a VisualForce page to use in the Service Cloud Console. Can this be accomplished? If so, how would you go about doing this?

This is my first week working with Salesforce, coming from a Coldfusion (don't be a hater!) and SQL Server background. 

Our users want to be able to see the number of Contacts for an account at a glance. To accommodate this, we've developed a custom field -- Account.Contact_Count__c which is an integer. Now for the hard part; populating it. We can't do a rollup because you can't roll up child data. So I wrote this bulk updater to do the work. I scheduled it (successfully) in the hopes that would get around the data governance limits, but no such luck.

We have thousands of accounts, and I won't know if they require updating unless I run a query on them. Is there a good way to run this in a background at low demand times? Is there a way that I can run it in blocks of data? Is there some super-duper easy way of running this that I simply didn't know about? Can I have this class call another class in order to reset the count of transactions?  Also, please note that as far as I can tell you can't combine count() with sub queries. I tried to make variations on this query work a number of different ways:

Select a.Contact_Count__C, count(Select ID From Contact Where AccountID = a.ID)

From Account a

I never got it to work. 

I'm currently orders of magnitude away from being able to execute this code. Help me understand that right way to accomplish a task like this in salesforce!

 I've run this both on-demand (so I can see errors) and scheduled. 

global class ModifyContractCount {

//completeRecount updates all records with the latest count of contacts

//the @future makes this available to be scheduled

@future(callout=true)

public static void completeRecount()

{ //Identify the number of contacts for a particular account and update the Contact Count variable appropriately //Create list of records to update.

List<Account> AcctsToUpdate = [ SELECT A.ID, A.Contact_Count__c FROM Account A LIMIT 50 //NOTE: Works with 50 or fewer ];

//Loop through returned records

for(Account a : AcctsToUpdate)

{

//Identify number of child contacts

Integer NumberOfContacts =

[ SELECT count()FROM Contact WHERE AccountID = :a.Id

];

//If the Accounts.Contact_Count__c is not the same as the number of child contacts, update the record

if (NumberOfContacts != a.Contact_Count__c)

{

a.Contact_Count__c = NumberOfContacts; update a; } //end for loop } //end completeRecount method }

];

//If the Accounts.Contact_Count__c is not the same as the number of child contacts, update the record

if (NumberOfContacts != a.Contact_Count__c)

{a.Contact_Count__c = NumberOfContacts;

update a;}

//end for loop

}

//end completeRecount method }