Just another WordPress site
Perhaps you’ve typed in a grep command that wasn’t well thought out. Here is how to exit grep and get your terminal to respond again.
Make sure the terminal window is active and press the following keys to exit grep and cancel the current command: ctrl + c
ctrl + cThis gets you back to :
$ yourusername@YourComputerName TERMINALNAME ~/currentfolder (status)
$ |and you can type new commands again.
“grep” is a command you can use in a terminal to find sequences of characters. It can search through entire folders and find matches. If you use the right parameters, it will display all the matches it finds.
Before simply typing the command, however, you should know it might need a long time to comb through entire folders! So don’t simply type the command in a large folder right away.
Example: don’t just type:
$ grep "philosphy"
in any folder! It will run for ages because you’ve typed a command that doesn’t mean anything. You’ll have the feeling the computer is hanging because nothing happens. If your grep is hanging, follow these steps.
So to search for “string” in all the files of a directory, the easiest is to:
grep -r "string" .A terminal is used to communicate commands to your computer. It’s the most basic form of telling it what to do.
Practically, when you use a mouse to click on a file to open it, this is simply a Graphic User Interface (GUI) that converts that action into a terminal command in the background. In this case, “open this file with that program”.
Here are terminal commands, roughly listed in the order you might need to discover them:
Git helps you synchronize and track changes to a folder with its subfolders. A website is basically a folder on a server somewhere. In the folder are subfolders, images, text documents, databases and such. Git makes it possible to synchronize the content of the folders, take a portion out to fiddle with, and then merge it back.
In a way, it does what Dropbox or Box.com do: it tracks changes, notes who changes what, can revert changes if needed (“undo”) and highlights discrepancies or conflicts if something was updated in several locations at once.
Me.
Usually developers sync two folders, when they’re the only ones working on a project:
Sometimes, they sync three folders:
If more than one developer are working on the same project, then each of them can synchronize and track changes on their local computer, but they always refer to the main project folder. At this point, I’m not sure whether they can sync files among their local computers without syncing them to the main “repository” first.
Git in itself is a protocol, a standard in the way changes are documented and traced. To apply or use this protocol, you can choose from among different software and platforms.
To use commands and actually use the protocol, you can use either Git Bash (Unix/Linux) or Git CMD (Windows). Regularly update Git Bash with this command:
git update-git-for-windowsA different tool helps you manage the repositories and see what’s in them. For example, Github is a platform that helps you manage git repositories. It works from either their website platform or from Github desktop, a software that you install on your computer.
Aside from Github, there’s also Gitkraken, Bitbucket, Gitlab, and others, too.
I just started this website a short while ago and the default URL “slug” is was ugly:
http://www.freshangle.eu/index.php/2020/10/06/actual-name-of-my-page/I’d expected it to be something much simpler, but that’s not what the default is. It isn’t too difficult to change this, though.
Here’s the ideal url slug structure I’m aiming for:
And the pages URLs would look like this:
http://www.freshangle.eu/speak/actual-page-name/
http://www.freshangle.eu/webdev/actual-page-name/
http://www.freshangle.eu/seo/actual-page-name/Short, concise and accurate.
In the back-office of the WordPress website, click “Settings” on the left menu bar and find the “Permalinks” tab.
From there, you can select a few basic options:
We’re going to keep the same bullet choice – Custom Structure – but modify the parameters. Here is the new layout:
I manually erased the weird “/index.php/” portion. Then I toggled the parameters just beneath that on and off until I got what I wanted. Note that even though the “category” only appears once, sub-categories will appear fine, as in “/category/sub-category/article-name”.
Click the “save button” and there you go! It’s all updated throughout the website!
Of course, the crucial part then is TESTING… nothing should be declared done until it has been fully tested!
yours truly
In this case, testing means clicking a few pages open and seeing what happens. Here’s what works out-of-the-box:
Notice the nice “nested” categories?
http://www.freshangle.eu/speak/cebuano/test-for-a-cebuano-post/However, links in past articles are still referring to the old, ugly URL, as shown when you hover over the link with the cursor:
Links that cause redirections isn’t good for SEO. You should go back to each article and re-issue each link. You can do this manually when there aren’t too many posts, but if you’ve got more than an hour’s work then it’s better to automate it.
In the end, a website is like a living creature. Perhaps like a tree or shrub growing in a well-tended garden. It needs pruning and care, and how you do it depends on what you want to get as a result.
On this website, I hope to have several points of interest.
As a result, it’ll have three main categories that would result into three main URL slugs. From there, each article will strive to be unique, focused on a single point, and not really dependent on news or time. So no need for the year/month/day structure you see in the initial page slug above.
See? Short, concise yet accurate.
Make it simple and easy to understand. Just the urls themselves should be enough to explain what the website is about.
Only include date elements (year, month, day) in the URL if it is really relevant.
For example, in our Language section described above, we might include tips about French, English and other languages. It would make sense to have sub-categories for these that would also be reflected in the URL:
http://www.freshangle.eu/speak/french/actual-name-of-the-page.htmlHowever, within that language, there might be lots of different types of subdivisions: grammar, vocabulary, trivia, pronunciation… it would be impractical to make any subcategories that dive any deeper than the “language” subcategory. It’ll simply be clearer to have a “basic-french-grammar-summary.html” page, with links to other pages that would remain at the same level within the “/french/” sub-category directly.
One of the most confusing things of starting off as a developer is the mind-boggling amount of logins and passwords you need to work. The term “google” means lots and lots, and it seems a developer needs about one or two google passwords…
It’s largely due to the decentralized nature of the internet. There isn’t a single authority controlling everything and gatekeeping your access to all the tools, plugins and services you need. It’s a good thing. Good things often require nitty-gritty work and details.
Let’s take a look at the first few passwords you’re going to need.
First off, you need some ways to access and use WordPress. Secondly, it’s important to set things up with Git so you can modify and track changes to website files between your own computer and the production server.
Local is WordPress’s answer to developers seeking to set up a local server on their computer. A local server is needed to perform the server’s tasks when a webpage is called up on the computer’s browser.
So since I’ve been going about learning web development all backwards (after tweaking websites with the “inspect mode”, my first question was “What is git?”…), I’m slowly putting things in order.
Local – I’ll call it LocalWP ’cause it’s mighty confusing – emulates a web server’s activity on your local computer. It’s one of the three basic tools for developers.
I understand it’s able to:
After downloading the right version for me (Windows), I double-clicked the installer and after less than a minute I reached the following clear, super-simple screen. Everything was very easy and I only had to click “next”, so it was a cinch!
Remember, the first day of the FreshAngle website wasn’t very far away. I had already had to slog through installing the WordPress package on my OVH server host, create the database that somehow holds the site together, and created a few logins: for the WordPress back-office, the website database, and, for some reason, for FTP transfer.
Since it wasn’t easy, going through the OVH documentation, their email that’s filled with obscure terms, and basically having to repeat some of the steps twice and even erasing the whole thing just because I got the database name wrong (thing something along the lines of “myfirstdatabase” until I realized I’d be stuck with it forever if I didn’t set it right from the start). That green “Create a new site” button above shines ominously…
Let’s click it!
Welp, that wasn’t what I needed. It sets a whole new website up, as if I hadn’t already one running on the other side of the planet. That’s perfect for a new website, though, I guess.
It even created one using another wordpress default template:
But it does have the “freshangle.local” url – and it works swell, that was one of the goals, wasn’t it?
Just that now I have to somehow replace this local FreshAngle site with my real one, the one I opened through WordPress and am now writing this post on…
It seems all the easy “connect to this and that” are only to their Flywheel-hosted websites. I think connecting to my own, OVH-hosted website will require some digging.
Unless it created the new site as a placeholder? That’s a question for another day…
Another advantage of LocalWP (or Local) is that updates are easy to install. It basically re-installs the software but retains your own local documents and sites.
Just started a website and eager to make it look and work better? Here is the first set of tools you’ll need to start digging through the spaghetti of code that’s hidden behind the back-office interface.
I’ve got four that I use for normal work: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Tor.
With the browser you check and use your site as a normal user would. On top of that, it’s also:
All code is text. Everything that runs the website, in the end, is a text file. Notepad works fine, but when files are more than 10 lines long, better software can help. These are called Integrated Development Environments, or IDE for short. Full-blown ones include error identification, syntax correction and auto-completion. Lighter ones only include coloring (gray for commands and red for strings, for instance) and automatic ind
I use Sublimetext, which color-codes certain languages and helps clarify code with indention and the like.
It’s theoretically possible to just change files and upload them to the production server manually, but it would certainly crash the website if the changes weren’t tested beforehand. So to work on the changes and check that they work at a very basic level, you need to set a local server up on your computer.
That’s what the local server software helps you do. It usually does more than simply being a local server: it often helps you gather the original website from the remote server, and forward any modifications to it when you’re ready. In that sense, it also doubles as a File Transfer Software, or FTP software.
Since I run a WordPress site and I use Windows (I know) on my computer, I went for Local, which is related to WordPress itself.
Several different software packages make it possible to open and run a local server on your computer for you to test website development on.
XAMPP, MAMP, Wamp, and others are available. Most are free but paying unlocks more features. XAMPP has probably been around for longest. New ones include VVV, which somehow is directly related to WordPress.org.
Since I’m running a WordPress website and need something easy to understand and use, I first thought I’d go with Local. Local is somehow directly connected to the WordPress universe. However, it isn’t managed by the same team, and it also relies on synergies with Flywheel.
It seems it doesn’t include an automatic git connection, but the help forum mentions how to connect Localwp and git so that version tracking is complete. The paying version of Local includes MagicSync, which is probably not necessary if I’m using Git and Github correctly.
From what I saw on the features screen, it can even manage, for a single site, the three environments that a website can deploy to: