Blog - 2021

zshcommand linelinux

December 4, 2021   3 min read

I've been getting more and more comfortable working on the command line in Linux, and looked into ways to pretty it up and make it more user friendly. Enter Zsh, an alternative to Bash shell, and the Oh-My-Zsh framework used to customize the terminal experience to your heart's content. Here's my basic set up.

web development

October 23, 2021   3 min read

One of the not-so-great parts of developing with Nuxt is the several seconds of wait time for your dev server to warm up, and several more seconds of waiting for hot-module reloading or HMR. The forthcoming Nuxt 3 (currently in beta) will have Vite built-in for ultra-fast HMR in development. Because the Nuxt/Content module does not work with Nuxt 3 as of this writing, we must continue using Nuxt 2, but we can still get fast HMR with the awesome Nuxt-Vite module!

web development

October 18, 2021   2 min read

PrismJS is great for making code blocks look pretty, it comes with a set of several themes out of the box, and there's also many more additional themes available as a separate package on NPM and Yarn. But what if none of those matches the color scheme of your website? With Nuxt you can easily use a custom CSS file to make your code blocks perfectly match the overall look of your site or blog. Here's how.

netlifyweb development

October 11, 2021   3 min read

Netlify has many awesome built-in features, and one of them is Netlify Forms, which essentially handles the "back-end" of your forms in most cases. But when hosting your Nuxt site on Netlify, it may not detect it even after you follow the instructions in their documentation, usually because there's one key "trick" missing that just makes it work. So let's discuss that trick and make sure Netlify Forms does what it's supposed to.

web development

October 8, 2021   4 min read

The excellent Nuxt/Sitemap module can automatically generate a new sitemap.xml at each build, and you can set either static and/or dynamic routes in it's config. It can also auto-generate routes to your blog posts (or whatever other content) fetched and displayed in a slug file, so a new post shows up with the correct route in the sitemap when created. Here's a quick and simple guide for Nuxt/Sitemap to generate routes to your Nuxt/Content blog posts, whether static or SSR.

web development

September 29, 2021   2 min read

Getting started learning Amazon Web Services can be a bit intimidating. Once you've created your free account there's so many services on the AWS console that it can be overwhelming and confusing to figure out where to get started. So let's ease our way and start by just hosting a simple static website with AWS Amplify, it only takes a few minutes!

sshcommand linegithub

September 21, 2021   5 min read

Setting up SSH keys and pushing to GitHub without needing to enter a username and password has always been a good practice, but now that GitHub is deprecating basic username and password authentication, it's past time to get this set up if you haven't already. It's pretty simple and only takes a few minutes, here's the quick and dirty instructions.

web development

September 17, 2021   3 min read

I was having some issue getting this to work on a static (not SSR) site made with Nuxt, and although I read through a bunch of blog articles, most of them seemed to be missing some piece of information or other that made it not work for me. After mixing and matching some of the instructions, and combining the useful info with the official Nuxt documentation, I finally did all the necessary steps and got it to work. So here's a clear, succinct guide to using Prism.js in a Nuxt static site.

linuxcommand line

September 15, 2021   5 min read

Rsync is a very handy tool for doing high-speed file transfers between Linux hosts over a local network or remote hosts on the internet, such as EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You can pass options to Rsync to do things like recursive transfer (all files and sub-directories within the source directory are also transferred), ignore existing or newer files at the destination, and more.

linuxcommand line

September 13, 2021   5 min read

When using Linux headless, such as via SSH or with no desktop environment, accessing a newly installed hard drive (not just external USB drives, but additional internal HDDs too) is not obvious, and most people end up having to Google it. I know I did. So let's have a quick and dirty guide on how.

sshcommand line

September 12, 2021   4 min read

Secure Shell is a protocol for securely connecting from one computer to another. As a web developer, you will probably end up using SSH a lot, and even if you don't it's a handy skill to have. Here's a quick guide on how to generate SSH keys and copy them to other machines.

gitcommand line

September 8, 2021   6 min read

When I was learning Git, in order to avoid giant articles and get right to the commands I needed reminding of, I made myself a cheat sheet that plainly and succinctly explained each Git command. Here is that quick and dirty guide of Git commands that you will likely use often as a web developer.

sshcommand line

September 7, 2021   1 min read

How to copy SSH keys between Linux hosts and from Windows to Linux.

web developmentnetlifycloudflare

September 6, 2021   7 min read

So you're learning web development, building things locally and only ever seeing your site or app when you run it on your computer. But how do you get this thing online so you can make sure it works on the interwebs? How do you learn headers, content-security-policy and CORS without having a site hosted online to work with? And how to do it FOR FREE?

smblinuxnetworking

September 1, 2021   5 min read

A quick and dirty guide on how to easily set up a Samba share on Linux that can be accessed from Windows PCs on the same network.

android

August 31, 2021   4 min read

I have a Sony Bravia 4K TV and it is awesome. It has built-in Android TV so you can use Android apps on your TV, but not every app is available, and one of those is DirecTV Stream -- necessary to view live TV from my cable provider, AT&T, without need for a separate set-top box. So here's how to sideload the DirecTV Stream app on Sony Bravia TVs without using the Google Play Store.