Month: March 2012

Setting up a Samba fileshare on the command line on Linux

linux, samba

Setting up a Samba fileshare on Linux (I prefer Ubuntu for myself) from the command line is simple enough and very easy to configure.

Create the folder, chmod the folder to full read and write settings and set the folder ownership to “nobody”. This should be OK as hopefully you’ll only have access to the shared folder on your local network.

Meanwhile, one line on the CLI will enable the file sharing settings:

net usershare add shared /home/yourhostname/somefolder/shared "yourhostname shared" everyone:F guest_ok=y

That should be it. You can then access the folder with no passwords and from any machine on the local network.

Confirm your settings are OK when running this command below:

root@yourhostname/home/somefolder/Desktop# net usershare info --long
[shared]
path=/home/yourhostname/Desktop/shared
comment=yourhostname shared
usershare_acl=Everyone:F,
guest_ok=y

Search and replace all string instances in vim editor

vim

When I was working on a very, very long script, I wanted to find a way to quickly and easily replace all string instances.

vim includes a :substitute command that searches a pattern in a body of text, then replaces all the instances available.

:%s/foo/bar/g
Find each occurrence of 'foo', and replace it with 'bar'.
:5,12s/foo/bar/g 
Change each 'foo' to 'bar' for all lines from line 5 to line 12 inclusive.

iPhone turns HTML links into telephone number links

iphone

On the iPhone, HTML links of numbers are converted to telephone number links. That means whenever a number with more than 7 digits has an anchor HTML link, and the link is clicked on your iPhone, your handset will attempt to make a phone call to the telephone number.

There is a meta tag that you can use that will ignore these links on the iPhone or on the iPad.

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

					

			
	
			
	


				
					



	
	

		
Including an avatar on your WordPress blog profile

					wordpress
		
			


					

			
After setting up this blog, I discovered that simply adding a picture to your profile would not change your avatar on your WordPress blog.


I did some Googling and found that you will need to sign up for a Gravatar (this stands for Globally Recognized Avatars).


The Gravatar  is integrated into your WordPress blog, and so you will need to sign up for an account here then attach that to your WordPress blog. Using Gravatars

					

			
	
			
	


				
					


				
					



	
	

		
How to ignore files from git commit and push

					git
		
			


					

			
Sometimes, you will want to ignore files from your git commits and pushes. For example, I had a file that stored some database information on my local machine/staging server, but the same database information doesn’t apply to my production environment.


git comes with a file called .gitignore that allows you to ignore any files during a commit or push. The .gitignore file will need to be in the top level of your working directory, and just needs to include the filename that you don’t want to use.


There is also another file located in /.git/info/exclude that you can include your files to ignore. Mac OSX has a hidden file in all directories called .DS_Store, so the below exclude file is an example that you can use:


# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~
.DS_Store

					

			
	
			
	


				
					


				
					



	
	

		
Grabbing the ID of a Twitter user

					json, twitter
		
			


					

			
Back in the old days, it would be pretty easy to grab the unique identifier of a Twitter account. These days, Twitter have gotten a bit more tricky and protective of such information.


There are, however, loopholes that will help you grab the unique user ID of a Twitter user and all you need is a browser 😉


For the user that you want to retrieve the twitter ID of, visit this page below:


http://api.twitter.com/users/show/some_twitter_username_here.json


JSON will load in your browser. From there, you should be able to very easily find the id node that contains the Twitter user ID. Enjoy!

					

			
	
			
	


				
					



	
	

		
Discovering Blog Ping Services

					curl, php, SEO
		
			


					

			
When driving traffic to a website, the continuous battle is the constant chopping and changing of your page and content in order to create the perfect SEO formula. I have always been interested how WordPress and Blogspot pages were able to receive traffic so quickly, and so much of it, without any kind of special optimizing of the page. Sure enough, Google has built a smart algorithm that will index and extract content from these blogs, but I couldn’t work out how search engines “knew” new content has been published on a Blog.


I have recently found out about “blog ping services” today, and spent some time reading up on these. Basically, a blog ping service will notify search engines and aggregators when there has been new content published on your page. Very smart! In addition to that, content is indexed very quickly and in many cases will filter through into blog aggregators such as Google blogs and Yahoo! blogs.


So, in PHP, how did I achieve this task? I started out with pingomatic. If you visit pingomatic’s homepage, you will see the different search engines that this blog ping delivers notifications to.


The next step was to integrate this into my code. Firstly, build your pingomatic URL, and keep it safe for later. Generally, the Pingomatic page will tell you to bookmark the page so that whenever you update your blog, you can visit that URL and Pingomatic’s harvester will deliver a message to all of the search engines.


Of course the most important job of a web developer is to strive for optimization and automation. We’re letting Pingomatic do the optimization for us, so now let’s focus on the automation. In my example below, this is a simple way to use PHP:


$webservice = "http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title=yourblog&blogurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yourblog.com&rssurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yourblog.com%2Ffootball_news.xml&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_newsisfree=on&chk_topicexchange=on&chk_google=on&chk_tailrank=on&chk_postrank=on&chk_skygrid=on&chk_collecta=on&chk_superfeedr=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on";
 $ch = curl_init();
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $webservice);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,
 array('Content-type: text/xml'
 , 'Content-length: '.strlen($request)
 ,'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U;
 Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729' ));
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $request);
 $result = curl_exec($ch);


Quite simply, if you embed this code into your PHP code, a curl request will be sent to Pingomatic notifying their harvester that there is new content on your page. Done – enjoy the new traffic!

					

			
	
			
	


				
					



	
	

		
Runkeeper: software that really changes lives

					exercise, runkeeper
		
			


					

			
Just under a year ago, I kept hearing the word “Runkeeper” bandied around the office. I was a little intrigued, but admittedly I had absolutely no idea what on earth this tool did.


I’d completely fallen out of the loop; an iPhone equipped techie (the only one in the office) and I had no idea what on earth this application was all about. The shame of it.


A colleague later explained that this application tracks and catalogues your daily exercise, whilst presenting your activities within a Facebook-like interface where you could “Like” and comment on your buddies’ jogging and activities.


Since university, I’ll admit, exercising really wasn’t that important. I’d played a fair bit of football throughout my early years – not to that good of a level, but enough to keep fit – but since I’d enrolled at college my most strenuous activity would be the lifting of a pint glass or moving from my bed to the computer desk to settle down into another session of Championship Manager.


Last year though, that changed and I decided to give the Runkeeper a go. Very quickly I became addicted with this application and celebrating my “Street Teammates” activities with a click of the Like button or a cheeky comment and praise for their efforts.


Then, within a few months, I noticed my runs were getting longer and quicker; all thanks to the statistics charts and time keeping tool within this app. I was hooked. This tool had changed my daily life, no longer would I go home and watch TV, this would be the way I would choose to spend my Monday and Tuesday evenings.


I was then able to cheer on as my work colleague completed the Tokyo Marathon, and even watch his progress live 300 miles away via Runkeeper. Unbelievable.


In my workplace of around only ten people, five are regular Runkeeper users. I suspect that the developers of this tool will enjoy huge success over the coming years as people take on a new healthier way of life.


This is a great example of how software change lives for the better, thank you very much Runkeeper!