Nishanth Shanmugham

Use @ instead of HEAD

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 17:09:14 -0500

I recently discovered that from git version 1.8.5 onwards, @ can replace HEAD:

$ git reset --hard @~2
$ git rebase -i @~10
$ git diff @~2..@~3

And also in most scenarios HEAD can be left out completely, so you can say:

$ git reset -- @{2}

instead of:

$ git reset -- HEAD@{2}

It takes some getting used to, but it’s definitely faster than typing HEAD.

Redirect webpages using HTML

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 15:45:30 -0700

Webpage redirection is great for automatically redirecting people visiting an old URL to a new URL where the content has moved to. It can be done using JavaScript, but there is also a convenient HTML-only solution.

To redirect visitors reaching yourwebsite.com/blog to yourwebsite.com/posts, add this to the <head> section of the HTML at yourwebsite.com/blog:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url='/posts'" />
<link rel="canonical" href="/posts" />

walkthrough

Setting http-equiv="refresh" in the first line performs the actual redirect. The number in the content attribute specified in seconds tells the browser how long to wait before redirecting. In this example, 0 redirects immediately. Increasing the wait may be useful for briefly displaying a 404 page before automatically switching to the home page. The url specfies the destination for the redirect. In this example, we wanted to switch to /posts.

The second line is optional; it helps search engines know which the preferred version of the page is. Usually, this is the redirect destination.

About

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 06:42:21 -0700

I’m a software engineer and student at UT Austin. I primarily program in JavaScript. I currently work at Evernote. I also teach a web development class as part of MAD, a computer science campus organization.

I love soccer and mediterranean food. You can find recent open source work on GitHub.

Please feel free to get in touch at nishanths@utexas.edu.

About this site

colophon

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 06:28:26 -0700

This website is the place where I write about JavaScript, git, and tech. It is also a personal homepage.

The site is built with Hugo—a static site generator made with Go and is hosted on GitHub Pages. The website source code is available on GitHub. It uses the cocoa theme. The posts are written in Markdown.

The primary font face is Proxima Nova and the monospace font face is Ubuntu Mono. The social icons are from the Ionicons font set. CSS classes for code syntax highlighting are inserted during compile-time by Hugo using Pygments.

If you find errors, please let me know.

Code

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 20:29:37 -0700

iterators.js: Useful functional iterators for node and the browser
Spitfire: HackTX 2015, Winner – a real-time rhyming assistant
markdown-viewer-component: Web Component that renders Markdown placed inside an element as HTML
cocoa-hugo-theme: Distraction-free reading theme for Hugo, the static site generator
slack-texts: Important channel messages also sent to your phone via SMS
YWeatherAPI: Powerful Yahoo! Weather API wrapper for Mac and iOS
uMAD 2015: Website for the student developer conference built with Middleman
What’s Playing: Desktop notifications for online music playback changes
QuickCal: Highlight and add dates from any website to Google Calendar
YouTube Pause: Spacebar pauses the video instead of scrolling down the page. CNET
ISBN Search: DuckDuckGo module to lookup book information by ISBN
HTML Entities Encoder & Decoder: Encode and decode HTML entities on DuckDuckGo using natural queries
Auto-Browser: HackTX 2014, Top 10

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000