Having just spent the afternoon showing Karin from Scream Blue Murder how to use git, I figured this would be a useful reference. It’s super quick because there is little to no explanation here, just the raw commands. It’s up to you to do a bit more research to understand what’s going on! Saying that, there should be enough here to get you working with git, even if you don’t grasp it all – just dive right in and play around.
Blog
Site Launch: James North Thrillers
We’ve recently launched a website and blog for author James North. James needed a website to augment the release of his upcoming book Deep Deception on 8th November and there was only a 3 week window to get the site designed and built.
Backup folders outside your sync app using symlinks
I say “sync app” as this process works on Copy, Dropbox and the like, in just the same way.
The idea is to make it appear to your sync app that a folder is inside it’s watched folder, when it is in fact somewhere else entirely.
Windows:
Use either the JUNCTION utility from Sysinternals, or the MKLINK command built in to Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008, for example:
junction "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\DesiredFolder" "C:\Path\To\DesiredFolder"
mklink /D "C:\Users\Steve\Documents\Dropbox\DesiredFolder" "C:\Path\To\DesiredFolder"
Or, if you prefer a GUI, install Link Shell Extension.
OS X or Linux:
Use the ln command, for example:
ln -s /path/to/desired-folder ~/Dropbox/desired-folder
This works with files too:
ln -s /path/to/desired-file ~/Dropbox/desired-file
Another easy way to do this with Terminal is type the ln -s part, then from Finder drag the folder/file that you want into the Terminal window then drag the Dropbox folder and hit return.
Reduce the number of malicious URL requests that hit your website
If your site runs on Apache and you’re familiar with .htaccess, the 5G Blacklist is an effective way to secure your site against malicious HTTP activity.
[Update: The 6G Blacklist is now available.]
The 5G Blacklist is a simple, flexible blacklist that checks all URI requests against a series of carefully constructed HTAccess directives. This happens quietly behind the scenes at the server level, saving resources for stuff like PHP and MySQL for all blocked requests.
Simply add the following code to your site’s .htaccess file. Make sure you make a copy of your existing file before making any changes.
What is web hosting and why do I need it?
After being asked this question many times, we thought we would write the answer up so we can simply refer people here. In order for people to access your website, the files that make up the site must be saved (hosted) on a fast computer that is permanently connected to the internet via a very fast pipe. We call this type of computer a server as when users visit your pages, the server responds and serves up the content that is being requested.
If you try to host your site over a standard broadband line, or the server is overloaded, it will take longer to display your pages and visitors may click away before they have ever seen your site! Some hosting providers charge you based on how much data is being transferred (your bandwidth). With our hosting, you have unlimited bandwidth, so if your site gets a sudden increase in popularity, you won’t get any extra bills, plus you’ll always get great performance and all of your content is being backed up to 2 different physical locations.
Photo by getbutterfly
The server also handles all your email – saving messages to their various mailboxes and serving it up to you when you check your mail.
You can find out exactly what’s included in our “all-in-one” hosting package over on our web hosting prices page (there are actually more features than listed, but we wanted to keep it simple). At just over £80 to run your website for an entire year, it provides great value for money, especially when you consider you could easily spend that on having a tiny ad in the EDP for a week, for example. We also manage all of this for you, making it as hands free as you like, all included in the price. If you would like a new email account etc, you tell us what you want and we make it so!
If you have any questions about web hosting or anything else, feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.