Passions Play

Passions Play:
Tech Notes from Benjamin Turner

  • Extracting Single Files From a Zip

    I’ve been working with lots of zip files lately – site backups mostly. Often times this is because of some error message referring to a file contained within the archive. When the zip is quite large, having to extract gigabytes of information just to view the contents of one file is annoying. Because of this…

  • Replacing Newlines in Vim Searches

    While trying to get a clearer view of a line of text with 5 million characters in it, I ran into some nuances in Vim’s search and replace. The main issue was that replaceing the search string with a newline character – \n wasn’t visually creating a new line in the Vim buffer. I found…

  • Using Spacemacs

    A few months ago I started to use Spacemacs and org-mode to organize my writing and tasks. Being a Vim user has meant that I haven’t gone all it, but almost.

  • PDX WordCamp 2017 – Trellis, Bedrock and Roots.io Follow Up

    I had a great time last weekend at WordCamp PDX 2017 presenting an overview of Trellis and Bedrock – two Roots.io projects. Here are some notes and follow-up information.

  • Process for Building a Find Command

    While I was setting up logrotate on a server, I needed to traverse a large user directory to find all of the log files, ideally sorted by their size, excluding the mail directory. This is how I built up the command.

  • Using Unix Date for Bash Filename Timestamp

    I’ve started using a neat Bash trick for inserting time stamps into file names — insert a timestamp using command substitution (posix specification): Yes, this is a pain to type out — the first time. But going to the effort of writing this out allows us to quickly recall a command which gives us a filename…

  • Clearing PageSpeed Cache Using the Browser

    Clearing the PageSpeed cache wasn’t working when logging in as root and ‘touching’ the config file, so I enabled admin access through the browser.

  • Speaking at WordCamp PDX About Roots.io

    The schedule has been finalized for the 2017 PDX WordCamp, happening on September 23rd at Lewis and Clark College. There are a lot of great talks, and I’m glad that I can contribute to the community by sharing my knowledge of managing a WordPress site using the various Roots.io projects. As of right now, all…

  • Setting Up Vim to Transparently Work With GPG Files

    A quick look at how to setup Vim to transparently create and edit *.gpg files.

  • WP Asciinema Plugin

    I created a plugin called WP Asciinema to help add Asciicasts created using https://asciinema.org/ to WordPress. This is plugin is meant to help self-host asciicasts on your WordPress site. If you are simply wanting to include asciicasts from asciinema.org, then take a look at their embedding guidelines. Usage This plugin adds a shortcode to help display the…