I must be some sort of masochist: I've always been fascinated by computer-hacking, but never more than when it's directed at me. Every couple of months I'll get a mail in my inbox that sets off alarms. In most cases, they're obvious attempts to get ahold of my C.C. info; today, it was somethig a little more interesting: a socially engineered attempt at delivering a payload via an attached Word Document. Exciting!!

Touching again on the complexity of making flex-box columns scalable; this time I focus on one of the design challenges with this layout. When child items are burdened with the limits of CSS, sometimes the solution is to think outside of the box, literally, and work with the parent instead.

Why am I installing NodeJs and writing a custom Drupal module all so I can get a web-page translated with Google's Translate API?

Ever find yourself rotating between multiple applications within the same single workflow? For me, I like to call it the holy trinity: VS Code, GitKraken and Firefox. When I'm working on a site, I'll inevitably spend almost as much time cycling from one of these applications to the other as I do writing code. I finally got so sick and tired of this that I decided to write a little Bash script to make rotating between applications just a little less cumbersome. Since VS Code has a terminal emulator, I can run the script from there to jump quickly to the next application(s) in my workflow.

Ever feel like you basically spend the entire day hitting your head against a wall? It happens to the best of us--particularly when it comes to elements of DevOps we don't deal with on a daily basis. I spent far longer than I care to admit today trying to assess why my Drupal site theme wasn't updating despite holding my code to a microscope, and despite any number of cache clears. The culprit: the output path on my SASS compiler was set to the wrong folder. Seems like a novice mistake... which is why I'm commemorating it with a blog post: sometimes brain farts are just part of the job.

File permissions on Linux can be a pain. You can either understand them in symbolic mode (basically, alphabet soup--i.e., drwxrwxrwx), or you can master them in octal mode (i.e., 777--which roughly translates to "Open the gates of Mordor!"). While symbolic mode might acutually be the more human-readable format; octal mode feels a bit more intuitive, and in my experience is what I see referenced more often on the interwebz (i.e., StackOverflow). The problem?--Linux generally defaults to symbolic mode on the command line--such as when you run ls -l. Here's a short script that helps cope with this. Run it, and it'll give you the permissions for a file, directory, or contents of a directory in octal mode.

Turning on verbose error logging in Drupal is an important tool for diagnosing any number of problems. Unless you have the PHP syntax memorized, though, it's a bit of a pain to enable. Even if you keep the $config line commented out in your settings.php file, opening a file editor every time you need to turn it on can also be a pain. Here's a short Bash script that will automatically edit your settings.php file and turn on verbose error logging..

I finally stepped away from Google Analytics and implemented Plausible's cookie-free tracking on the blog. Ironically, to implement Plausible's code, I used Google's Tag Manager (this doesn't compromise Plausible's code in any way; I just think it's sad that Google is still a crutch for my dev-ops). Since Plausible doesn't gather Personally Identifiable Information (PII), though, excluding my own usage on the site becomes a slight challenge; Google Analytics let's you exclude data based on IP--but, that's not an option with Plausible. With the help of Tag Manager, however, I can prevent Plausible's code from loading based on whether a CSS class is present on a DOM Element. When logged into Drupal, there are any number of CSS classes that are unique in the DOM. This provides a simple solution to excluding my own usage from Plausible's analytic data. Here's how to do that.

This is a followup, of sorts, to an earlier post on file sharing in Xubuntu--which can be kind of a pain. I never looked seriously at SCP as a solution for file sharing because it's honestly tedious--true for both in-network and out-of-network sharing. With a little Bash scripting, though, SCP can be made a lot more practical. Here are a couple of short scripts that take the edge off.

Don't you just hate doing Git Log, sifting through a bunch of commit hashes and then copy-pasting--all so you can reset to an earlier commit? I do--particularly the part where I need to select, copy and then paste the stupid hash. Today was a breaking point, actually. I finally wrote a script that will find the hash I want and pass it to Git Reset for me. My day is finally looking up.