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.

Posts on Nishanth Shanmugham

Use @ instead of HEAD

Redirect webpages using HTML

walkthrough