84 posts tagged with "tips"

A long time ago, years from now, I needed to expose data from my Joomla site in a simple web page outside Joomla, as an HTML table. This was so that I could link a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to this table and therefore, in Excel, simply do a Refresh to obtain the most recent data from my Joomla site.

The aim was to find the list of people who had bought software or services from me. Among other things, I needed their first name, family name, billing address, etc. so that I could create an invoice in Microsoft Word using the mail merge functionality (data source=Excel).

Of course, just running a query on your database and show the result as a web page can be really useful.

Have you ever deleted a website from your FTP client? It's easy, just select the folder containing the website and press the delete key.

Easy, simple and ... so slow. It takes ages to suppress files / folders. Several dozen minutes! Ouch.

If you've a SSH connection to your web server and if you're comfortable with it; you can rm -rf the folder and it'll be done in seconds.

But what if you don't have SSH or fear to make errors?

There is an alternative, the erase.php script.

By the use of a script, it's possible to ask WinSCP to synchronize your host and remote machine i.e. if a file is newer on the host, copy it to your remote server and the opposite.

If a file has been added to your host, copy it to your remote server and vice versa.

I'm using such script for making a full backup of some of my folders to my Synology.

In my previous article Bash - Script to add logging features to your script, I've shared a way to write information in a logfile.

By running ls -alh /tmp you will get the list of all files in the /tmp folder and display the list on your console. By running ls -alh /tmp >> application.log you won't see the list in your console since everything will be written in the application.log file.

How can we display the output of a command like ls f.i. both on the console and in a logfile?

Also read Bash - Echo on the console and in a logfile in the same time

When you write Bash scripts and certainly when you foresee running them in a cron, you should implement a logfile. Every action fired by your script should be logging somewhere so you can start the script in a non-interactive mode and in case of need, consult the last logfile.

Below is a script I've developed in the form of a library, which means you can easily include it in your existing code without having to change anything.

You just need to include the file in your script (i.e. add a source log.sh line) then here and there foresee a log::write "Something to log". Easy no?

The extension CodeSnap will take beautiful screenshots of your code in VS Code without effort.

Open your file in vscode, select the desired lines, press CTRL-SHIFT-P, run CodeSnap. You just need to select lines now.

A small tip: by running code --list-extensions in a console (Linux or DOS), you'll get the list of all extensions you've installed in VSCode.

Now, just copy/paste that list and you can send it to a friend Hey, here are the extensions I use. Maybe one or the other will be useful to you..

One of the best features in vscode is the Multiple cursors one.

Imagine you've a bunch of lines where you need for instance remove the first two characters. Each lines starts with '//' and you wish to remove them but only there (a search & replace can't be used).

Or, for another example, you must enclose each line in double brackets.

With vscode, it's ultra-simple: multiple cursors.

A callout (called admonition by Docusaurus) is a special syntax used to highlight a paragraph, f.i. a Pay attention to... or Tip: Did you know that... box.

On this blog powered by Docusaurus, the syntax for admonition is

:::caution[Pay attention to...]
Never give your bank card code to a stranger.
:::

and this is rendered like

And now a nice tip:

Quarto implements this a little differently, so let's have a look...

Using the Quarto includes short code, writing a long document can easily be broken down into several smaller ones.

Imagine the following main.qmd file:

# My thesis in Latin

{{< include chapter1.md >}}

{{< include chapter2.md >}}

Quarto will then merge the three files when you render main.qmd.