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Converting a Word Document to Markdown in Two Moves

The Problem

A lot of important government documents are created and saved in Microsoft Word (*.docx). But Microsoft Word is a proprietary format, and it's not really useful for presenting documents on the web. So, I wanted to find a way to convert a .docx file into markdown.

The Solution

As it turns out, there are several open-source tools that allow for conversion between file types. Pandoc is one of them, and it's powerful. In fact, pandoc's website says "If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife." But, although pandoc can convert from markdown into .docx, it doesn't work in the other direction.

Deploying a subfolder to GitHub Pages

Sometimes you want to have a subdirectory on the master branch be the root directory of a repository’s gh-pages branch. This is useful for things like sites developed with Yeoman, or if you have a Jekyll site contained in the master branch alongside the rest of your code.

For the sake of this example, let’s pretend the subfolder containing your site is named dist.

Step 1

Remove the dist directory from the project’s .gitignore file (it’s ignored by default by Yeoman).

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

Multiple SSH Keys settings for different github account

create different public key

create different ssh key according the article Mac Set-Up Git

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]"

Rails Models

Generating models

$ rails g model User

Associations

belongs_to

has_one

Friendly URLs

By default, Rails applications build URLs based on the primary key -- the id column from the database. Imagine we have a Person model and associated controller. We have a person record for Bob Martin that has id number 6. The URL for his show page would be:

/people/6

But, for aesthetic or SEO purposes, we want Bob's name in the URL. The last segment, the 6 here, is called the "slug". Let's look at a few ways to implement better slugs.

	from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
	from mymodule import main
	import logging


	class Command(BaseCommand):
	help = 'Do foo'

	def handle(self, args, *options):

	##
	# Get the first 7 characters of the SHA1 of the most common ancestor of the given revs
	##
	BASE_FULL_SHA1=$(git merge-base "$1" "$2");
	BASE=$(cut -c 1-7 <<< $BASE_FULL_SHA1);

	##
	# Get (roughly) the number of commits between the given revs.
	# Add one for safety padding so the actual commit in question is included.
	##

	#!/bin/bash
	# virtualenv-auto-activate.sh
	#
	# Installation:
	# Add this line to your .bashrc or .bash-profile:
	#
	# source /path/to/virtualenv-auto-activate.sh
	#
	# Go to your project folder, run "virtualenv .venv", so your project folder
	# has a .venv folder at the top level, next to your version control directory.

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby
	# vim: set syntax=ruby

	# Ensures that changes to the Rails schema.rb file may only be committed if a
	# migration file is also committed at the same time.

	def schema_modified?
	%x[ git diff --cached \|grep schema.rb ] == ''
	end