Tag Archives: cut and paste code

Set the Web Server to Use the Domain Without www

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The main reason to bother with this is to help search rankings. Sub-domains (for example, www.curiouscat.com and curiouscat.com) are treated as separate websites even if you have entirely the same content displayed for both. If 20% of the links to your site use the www and 80% don’t then your sites ranking by search engines is less than it would be if it was just treated as one site.

You can set the domain to use in Google webmaster tools. But that doesn’t do anything for all the other search engines. Also if you have both, some reports some will keep statistics separately for the non-www and www domain (Google Adsense does this, for example).

Using virtual hosts file (sites-enabled)

For Apache you can place the following code in your virtual hosts file (in the sites-available directory under Apache).

Replace curiouscat.com with your domain name.

<Directory /srv/www/curiouscat.com/public_html/>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.curiouscat.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://curiouscat.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</Directory>

Then you need to capture the update and reload Apache.

Disable the site (in order to enable it with the updates)

sudo a2dissite curiouscat.com

Enable the site

sudo a2enssite curiouscat.com

Reload Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If when you try to reload you get this error message:

“Invalid command ‘RewriteEngine’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration” then enable modrewrite on apache:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

You should then be told to restart apache

udo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Using .htaccess

Or you can include the following in your .htaccess file

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.curiouscat.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://curiouscat.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Related: Checklist for Setting Up a New Domain on VPS – Phusion Passenger Tips and Troubleshooting Ideas

If you wanted to force www to be used instead just flip the regular expression around:

<Directory /srv/www/curiouscat.com/public_html/>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^curiouscat.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.curiouscat.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</Directory>

Replace Text in Files Recursively (Linux)

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To replace text in all the files in a directory, recursively, you can use grep.

sudo grep -rl texttoreplace /somedirectory/ | sudo xargs sed -i ‘s/repacethis/withthis/g’

sudo grep -rl oldtext /example/directory/ | sudo xargs sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

The g on the end, lets it replace all the instances of the text in each file.

More ubuntu and linux tips and code samples

Code to Display text only on WordPress Blog Home Page

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Cut and past php code to determine if it is the wordpress blog home page (and only the home page itself).

<?php if (is_home() && !is_paged()): ?>

Example, to print john if it is a “homepage” templated page and jill otherwise:

<?php if (is_home(); ?>

<?php
  if($name == 'john'){
    echo 'Hi John';
  }else if($name == 'jill'){
    echo 'Hi Jill';
  }else{
    echo 'Hi';
}
?>

Adding a Model in Ruby on Rails

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for Rails 2.*
Not for Rails 3

How to add a model in rails

  • ./script/generate resource MODELNAME
    • ./script/generate resource article
  • edit migrate file
  • edit model.rb – to add associations and validations
  • edit controller.rb – add the 7 rest methods
  • rake db:migrate – to run the new migration
  • If you have to add a table (like a join table) you can do something like, for example
    • ./script/generate migration add_join_table_for_articles_and_authors

Update to the routes file should be taken care of by generate resource, but might want to check).