New Blog Layout + Getting Started with GitHub

GitHub

The night from yesterday to today was a real turning point for me. I had known about GitHub for a long time, but I had never found an opportunity to actually start using it. Only yesterday did I decide that I finally had to back up my projects and source code somewhere – because if I lost them, I might as well go hang myself with a ribbon or a rope :(.

I asked Martin where I should store it. Platform-wise, the closest option seemed to be CodePlex, but I wanted to try something new. Martin offered me these options:

• BitBucket – Uses Git. But why not use Git right at the source, right? 🙂
• SourceForge – Platform-wise, the furthest from me. It uses SVN or Mercurial. I once tried SVN with TortoiseSVN and didn’t really get it.
• Google Code – Uses SVN. I don’t know why, but this site seems terribly bare and unpleasant to me. IMHO it would deserve a better coat and better “guts”.
• Git – at first I was a bit disappointed that unless I paid at least 7 USD/mo, I couldn’t have any private repo (project/solution), but then I told myself I’d go with a free account. I don’t have that many non-public projects anyway, and the ones I do have will go to Google Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive.

I filled in my GitHub profile, signed up at gravatar.com, and added my first project, which I couldn’t manage to commit, though. The problem was that I apparently created the repo in a directory that already existed, or something like that, I don’t remember anymore. Anyway, I know that back then I deleted the repo completely from the web, and after that the commit wouldn’t upload/push at all. I wrote to Martin asking what to do, since I wanted to do a “more thorough wipe” because I thought some traces of that project were still left somewhere.

But Martin talked me out of it and told me to click Open Shell, and also which commands to type there: git add . git commit -am "C2" (C2 is the name of the commit). And then the commit went through. I first created the second project on GitHub and only then moved the Visual Studio files into it, so committing worked without any trouble. But then I realized (once it was already on the web) that there were files in it that no eyes but mine were ever supposed to see, so I immediately looked into how to delete them.

I got answers from Martin that the only way is Rebase, which is a very complicated technique. So this time I had to delete the whole repo, properly clean up GitHub for Windows as well (by the way, the client is really nice, it’s in the Metro/Modern UI style), delete the bad files from the disk and commit again. By then I was finding my way around GitHub pretty well, which meant that the commit succeeded. Since then I haven’t added anything there, but I have sorted out where I’ll put what – summary:

I’ll gradually try to put as much as possible on GitHub.

Articles could be included there too. I’ll surely write one someday, once in xx years I hopefully speak English well, and those will go to CodeProject. You can find links to my “programming” profiles in the right sidebar.

Blog

I made only a few changes to the blog, so briefly:

1. I added new Blogger Badges and removed “About me”, so you no longer have to look at my photo 😀
2. I changed the blog name from “Untitled & L’amour Toujours” to “Hello world“. I also considered “Hello world & L’amour Toujours”, but not for now, maybe some other time.
3. I added a new link category “Programming profiles”
4. I arranged the Badges more logically
5. I added a favicon, which I also use on GitHub, for example. If you want to take a look at it, it probably won’t show up in Chrome, but in Opera or IE I can see it just fine :).