Helpful Coder

I recently started working on reanimating an ancient site I had just sitting around as a backup. It was built on a very old version of Joomla, and while some of the content is still relevant - much of it is not... So, rather than trying to figure out how to import all this content into some more modern CMS and then delete the old stuff, I decided to use this as an opportunity to play around with Pico - a PHP-based flat-file CMS. The idea is that you can easily create content by just creating markdown files in the 'content' directory, and they magically show up on the site. Organization is as simple as subdirectories inside content. Themes are just twig template files. I'm not a huge fan of twig (remember, PHP was originally a templating language... so why do we need something else for templates?) but I'll give it another try - I haven't used twig in at least six years, so maybe it's better. So far things have been going pretty smoothly - I can just copy...

I'm currently working on a pretty large, long-running project as the primary developer and systems administrator. I primarily work with one other person who acts as designer and the main interface with clients and others. Everyone works remote. We quickly realized we needed some way to keep track of ongoing issues/ideas/features - and our initial response was a simple google sheet. I'm a big fan of starting with the simplest possible system first and adding complexity as needed. This worked pretty well, although prioritizing/sorting and remove completed "issues" became clunky over time. In the past I've experienced quite a variety of systems for handling/tracking work. Jira is probably the most popular in larger organizations, but to my mind it was like using a sledgehammer when a pocket knife was needed... plus it was not free and we had no budget. Trello and things like it are pretty nice, but I wanted something with a little more capability to track all t...

Was just working on some server cleanup for a client and thought that this might be a handy tip for anyone out there in a similar situation... Here's the problem, I have a directory on a server that has lots (i.e. thousands) of subdirectories. I need to copy those up to an S3 backup bucket - organized by year and month - and then delete them. The tricky bit is they're not organized by month/year right now. It's just a giant mess of subdirectories without much of a coherent naming strategy. So, here's what I've come up with so far. First, I generate a text file listing all the directories, filtering through grep for the year I'm interested in, i.e. ls -ltr | grep 2019 > list.txt This gives me a list of all directory entries that have '2019' in them, which should get them all since we're using 'ls -l' Next, I open that file in vim, and copy all the files for the month I'm backing up, and use a regex to remove the leading bi...

Reading through my old posts, I found it ironic that one of them was about how I was back to using Macs again for work. Ironic because after eight years of using a mac, I switched back to Windows about a year ago. The reason was that my old mac laptop was getting long in the tooth, and I absolutely hated the new macbooks with their janky keyboard and stupid touchbar. Apparently the keyboard has gotten better since then... but I still feel that the macs are just too expensive for what you get. So I switched to Windows, thinking I'd dual-boot with Linux to give me an appropriate development environment. I still spend most of my time at the command line or in vim anyways. But I decided to try out WSL in Windows just to see what it was all about. What a pleasant surprise! I ended up getting a nice 13" gaming laptop that packs quite a punch in a lightweight package. Windows 10 is decent enough. It still has a lot of those annoying Windows quirks, but I can live with that. ...

I noticed the other day while checking out Google Analytics that this site was still alive and getting the occasional visit! That's great, but I think it deserves some freshening up. So stay tuned for some content that is a bit ... fresher!