Problems

Disabling hyphen substitution in Adium

By default Adium replaces two hyphens with an em-dash in text you type or paste. This leads to subtly confusing behaviour when pasting commands:

foo --bar

becomes “foo —bar”, which can look very similar to foo --bar if your contact is using a terminal that supports variable-width glyphs for exotic character points.

It’s a quick fix: stop double-hyphens being transformed to a long dash by right clicking the Adium input field, and unticking Substitutions > Smart Dashes from the menu.

window titles in screen and rxvt, from zsh

Recently I’ve been multiplexing work over many urxvt terminals: essential when you’re monitoring the logging output of several related binaries and managing several git branches related to each. The sensibilities of awesome have eased the window management, but I’ve become increasingly reliant on the window title to identify particular sessions. This is compounded one level further when I’m using screen; I want a useful identifier to show up in screen’s windowlist.

Getting nice prompts is a common need and there is plenty of information out there on setting your PS1, but for various reasons I’ve had problems finding a ‘nice’ setup that’s just worked exactly the way I’ve wanted it to with titles. Here are the pertinent parts of my working configuration:

I get the working directory and current command in the title
I get the title in the screen windowlist if running in screen
I get the same title in the WM_NAME of an rxvt or xterm, or the titlebar of an iTerm2, whether or not screen is involved

Continue reading “window titles in screen and rxvt, from zsh”

Search engine optimization with git web interfaces

I recently became frustrated with gitweb’s funky query-strings and decided to give cgit a try. Although there are some patches that make gitweb more user (and search engine) friendly, cgit is a much better web-interface for git, both in terms of the code and the actual user experience. However, there were still some opportunities for SEO.

I went through the HTML suggestions from the google webmaster tools and Google’s own SEO Starter Guide. I’ve pushed the search engine optimized cgit to my seo branch on github. You can see it in action at my git repositories. I’m testing all of this using an Apache ScriptAlias directive, I’m hoping it will still work alright with whatever other URL-processing schemes cgit supports. A short summary of the new SEO features so far:

Use HTML h1 and h2 heading tags instead of custom-styled divs
Much better title tags; commits have the commit subject, and the repo name has been added in a lot of places to avoid duplicate titles
The bread-crumb has been integrated into the heading
A configurable option to set nofollow relationships on links to non-HEAD commits, to avoid duplicate content being indexed

Of course, you could take the popular option of just using github instead of self-hosting your own git web interfaces… but even they don’t do quite a good a job IMO, they use the SHA1 in the web page titles, eww!