TOPIC: GITHUB
Keeping a file or directory out of a Git or GitHub repository
26th August 2024Recently, I have begun to do more version control of files with Git and GitHub. However, GitHub is not a place to keep files with log in credentials. Thus, I wanted to keep these locally but avoid having them being tracked in either Git or GitHub.
Adding the names to a .gitignore file will avoid their inclusion prospectively, but what can you do if they get added in error before you do? The answer that I found is to execute a command like the following:
git rm -r --cached [path to file or directory with its name]
That takes it out of the staging area and allows the .gitignore functionality to do its job. The -r switch makes the command recursive, should you be working with the contents of a directory. Then, the --cached flag is what does the removal from the staging area.
While the aforementioned worked for me when I had an oversight, the following is also suggested:
git update-index --assume-unchanged [path to file or directory with its name]
That may be working without a .gitignore file, which was not how I was doing things. Nevertheless, it may have its uses for someone else, so that is why I include it above.
A desktop Markdown editing environment
8th November 2022Earlier this year, I changed over two websites from dynamic versions using content management systems to static ones by using Hugo to build them from Markdown files. That meant that I needed to look at the editing of Markdown, even if it is a fairly simple file format. For one thing, Grammarly can be incorporated into WordPress, so I did not want to lose something like that.
The latter point meant that I was steered away from plain text editors. Otherwise, there are online ones like StackEdit and Dillinger, but the Firefox Grammarly plugin only appears to work on the first of these, and even then, only partially in my experience. While Dillinger does offer connections to online file storage providers like Google, Dropbox and OneDrive, I wanted to store files on my desktop for upload to a web server. It also works with GitHub, but I prefer to use another web hosting provider.
There are various specialised Markdown editors for desktop usage like Typora, ReText, Formiko or Ghostwriter, yet I chose none of these. My actual choice may surprise many: it was Visual Studio Code. The availability of a Grammarly plug-in was what swayed it for me, even if it did need to be switched on for Markdown files. In many ways, it does work as smoothly as elsewhere because it gets fooled by links and other code-like pieces of text. Also, having the added ability to add words to a custom dictionary would be ideal. Some rule overriding is available, but I am not sure that everything is covered, even if the list of options is lengthy. Some time is needed to inspect all of them before I proceed any further. Thus far, things are working well enough for me.
Some books and other forms of documentation on R
11th September 2021The thrust of an exhortation from a computing handbook publisher comes to mind here: don't just look things up on Google, read a book so you really understand what you are doing. A form of words like that was used to sell an eBook on GitHub, but the same sentiment applies to R or any other computing language. While using a search engine will get you going or add to existing knowledge, only a book or a training course will help to embed real competence.
In the case of R, there is a myriad of blogs out there that can be consulted, as well as function and package documentation on RDocumentation or rrdr.io. For the former, R-bloggers or R Weekly can make good places to start, while ones like Stats and R, Statistics Globe, STHDA, PSI's VIS-SIG and anything from Posit (including their main blog as well as their AI one) can be worth consulting. Additionally, there is also RStudio Education and the NHS-R Community, which also have a GitHub repository together with a YouTube channel. Many packages have dedicated websites as well, so there is no lack of documentation with all of these, so here is a selection:
To come to the real subject of this post, R is unusual in that books that you can buy also have companion websites that contain the same content with the same structure. Whatever funds this approach (and some appear to be supported by RStudio itself by the looks of things), there certainly are many books available freely online in HTML as you will see from the list below, while a few do not have a print counterpart as far as I know:
R Programming for Data Science
R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown
blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown
pagedown: Create Paged HTML Documents for Printing from R Markdown
Dynamic Documents with R and knitr
Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps
Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny
Happy Git and GitHub for the useR
Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny
Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps
Many of the above have counterparts published by O'Reilly or Chapman & Hall, to name the two publishers that I have found so far. Aside from sharing these with you, there is also the personal motivation of having the collection of links somewhere so I can close tabs in my Firefox session. There are other web articles open in other tabs that I need to retain and share, but these will need to do for now, and I hope that you find them as useful as I do.