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...

Been doing a lot of work lately moving sites from an old dedicated server to a new one with a new hosting company. The old server had no (useful) control panel, so I've been doing a lot of it by hand, and I thought I'd post a few handy pointers for anyone who may be in a similar situation. For static sites, the process is dead simple - just tar up the old site's content using something like tar -cf [tar filename].tar [path to site]/* will do it. Then depending on the site, it may save you a little time to zip the tarball. Then, after doing whatever you need to do to create a new site on the new server's control panel, login in with SSH, go to the appropriate directory and pull over the tarball with scp: scp [username]@[server]:[path to tarball]/[tar file] ./ And then extract it, and you're ready to go. One thing it watch out for is absolute paths in the content from the old site. If you know what they look like, it's pretty easy to grep for that pattern in the...