Category: Articles

Main articles page for all things web tools and code. A free resource for the public containing information and tips.

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Git resources: Git explained by humans, for humans

04/17/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Good Git structure overview

Structuring your Git upfront can save you a lot of headaches with you and your team later.  Here’s an overview of a great article to help you get your team back to the basics and set a new baseline from which to start relying on Git more effectively as a team.

Git pull rebase explained by humans, for humans

Here are a couple of posts explaining pulling with rebase and the difference between merging and rebasing.  You may want to read them a few times and try them out on your on repositories to get the hand of the best time to rebase and merge.

http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/11/pull-with-rebase.html

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing/

Git Submodules explanations

http://julienrenaux.fr/2014/08/05/how-to-use-git-submodules-to-facilitate-your-development-routine/

https://confluence.atlassian.com/sourcetreekb/adding-a-submodule-subtree-with-sourcetree-785332086.html?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fconfluence.atlassian.com%2Fsourcetreekb%2Fadding-a-submodule-subtree-with-sourcetree-785332086.html&application=cac

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabx_jxdzTQ&nohtml5=False

Git pruning branches explanation

Learn more about pruning your Git branches.  Here’s another good article here.

Git push

If Git couldn’t be more confusing with forcing a push, try this “safer” one:

git --force-with-lease

Here’s an explanation about “forcing with a lease” which sounds more like an early 20th century slum-lord tactic than something a web developer would have to do with their code repositories.

To remove any file matching  a wildcard, since many git command lines don’t support wildcards like the command line:

Where “error_log” is the file name or part of the file name:

find . -name error_log | xargs git rm -r

Reverse and Stage Hunks

I couldn’t resist, after all, Source Tree has been helpful for many developers maintain and find their way around multiple projects with multiple repositories because it can be confusing if you are just using Git on the command line.  You may be too cool to not use Git on the command line, you have to keep up your street cred, but this just helps you see the forest and the trees faster than typing a bunch of git on the command line.  I have better things to do.

Atlassian provides a lot of help on there, site, click here to learn about “hunks” and you’ll also learn why Git is still growing and has a lot of room for improvement.


Want to learn more about Puppet from Puppet Labs?

03/21/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Even with smaller companies, I don’t think it hurts to look into automating more server admin and web development processes.  Puppet is one of those DevOps tools that keeps popping up.   I’m definitely going to learn more about it so here’s a link to a free e-book, “Essential Steps to Mapping Your DevOps Journey” on Puppet Labs’ website.  I figured that was a good place to start.

“Managing infrastructure as code” is a recurring theme on their website and materials that makes a lot of sense.  I look forward to learning more about Puppet!


How embarrassing: Fixing the Mail Chimp pop-up form

03/21/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

It’s bound to happen, you’re going to be in a hurry and put the snazzy, slick Mail Chimp sign-up form on your website.  The pop-up, after all, looks great, but I highly recommend testing it because there are some serious assumptions the API author makes, one being that your JQuery library, which this pop-up behavior requires is, for some reason, in the same folder as the path from which the pop-up is being called from.

That’s a problem since most URL paths in WordPress sites don’t actually exist.  See the problem?!

This article helps explain the best ways to fix this issue, if you’re not sure, use the “embedded form” option in Mail Chimp instead OR be sure to install the JQuery library before the Mail Chimp pop-up script gets called.  I hope this saves another PHP developer/Wordpress developer some time finding the solution.  I just wish Mail Chimp would CDN the version of JQuery if it can confirm JQuery isn’t already loaded, this would ensure no version conflicts and make the process much easier.

To view the solutions to this Mail Chimp pop-up problem, click here!


.deb files: Installing Debian packages on your server

02/28/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Many awesome software packages like Odoo come with free downloadable editions, it’s much easier to install software and packages via the command line, but sometimes you might need to download the package so you have an image ready to deploy quickly.  Whatever your reason, if you have a .deb file, that’s the package for Debian and Ubuntu Linux servers, this is usually how you install the .deb files:

dpkg -i packageNameHere.deb
dpkg --install packageNameHere.deb
dpkg -i -R /path/to/dir/name/dotDebFiles/
dpkg -i --recursive /path/to/dir/name/dotDebFiles/
  1. -i or --install : Install the package.
  2. -R or --recursive : Recursively install all *.deb files found in specified folders and all of its sub-folders. /path/to/dir/name/dotDebFiles/ must refer to a folder instead of packageNameHere.deb file name.

Trying to view .ost files? Beware — Microsoft Outlook Exchange acts differently than Microsoft Outlook

02/13/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

I usually don’t leave notes about normal boring Windows PC issues, but if you are a company that backs up your users’ Outlook mailbox data, if you ever want to access these “.ost” files, you might be in for a surprise.  “.pst” files are easy, because in Outlook all you have to do is go into your account settings and select the new “.pst” file.  Not so for those using Outlook with Exchange.  No, thanks to Microsoft, that can’t be easy, so before I thought I had to set up a new email account on Exchange then copy the file to the appropriate /User/  folder on the Windows machine just to view these archived emails, I thought I’d look around online.

Sure enough, I found a few “Ost Viewers”, tried one, and it worked just fine.  One was free that allowed me to go in and browse the .ost as if I had already set up the mailbox in Outlook.  This took only a couple of minutes.  I don’t want to endorse any particular website but searching “ost viewers” did the trick.  I hope this helps someone save some time, it’s never pleasant when something that seems so simple turns into potentially a two hour fiasco!