John Bickar's Blog Posts

Grep Invert Match

John Bickar — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:11:22 +0000

Today I learned about the -v flag for grep. The -v, or --invert-match, flag, returns all lines that do not match your regular expression.

Lessons Learned from 2+ Years of Using Behat

John Bickar — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 17:39:50 +0000

At the 2017 Stanford Drupal Camp, I facilitated a conversation about "Lessons Learned from 2+ Years Using Behat".

New Modules on Stanford Sites, September 2016

John Bickar — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 16:00:00 +0000

As part of the Summer 2016 updates to Stanford Sites, we recently added several new modules that bring enhanced features and functionality to all users of the Stanford Sites service. This post is a highlight of the new modules added; detailed posts on several of them will follow.

Git: Find the First Tag Containing a Specified Keyword

John Bickar — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Today's post is a quick tutorial how to use "git grep" and "git tag" to find the earliest tag that contains a particular line of code.

TL;DR: use:

git grep <regexp> $(git rev-list --all)

and

git tag --contains=<commit hash>

Stanford Sites Updates, Summer 2016

John Bickar — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 18:00:00 +0000

(Post last updated on: 9/6/16, 10:30AM)

University IT will perform maintenance on all websites on the Stanford Sites Drupal hosting service approximately bi-weekly from July 26th through September 23rd. Details on what is included in each update window are below, and we will update this post as we have more information.

A Simply Awesome Markup Language

John Bickar — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 07:01:00 +0000

The modern web developer has a variety of markup languages available for use in different contexts: XML, HTML, YAML, Markdown - the list goes on and on. Yet each has its limitation(s), whether that be performance, readability, or ease-of-use.

That all changes today with the introduction of the Syntactically Accurate Markup Language (SAML).

Drupal 8 REST Requests

John Bickar — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 16:25:12 +0000

In November, 2015, the Stanford Web Services team got to dive into Drupal 8 during a weeklong sprint. I was excited to look at the RESTful web services that Drupal 8 gives out-of-the-box; what follows is my documentation of the various types of requests supported, required headers, responses, and response codes.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive documentation of RESTful web services in Drupal 8. However, I have pulled information from various posts around the Web, and my own experimentation, into this post.

Module of the Day: WebAuth Extras

John Bickar — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 17:30:10 +0000

Today I'm going to review the features and functionality of the WebAuth Extras module. It extends the venerable WebAuth Module for Drupal (WMD), which offers single-sign on (SSO) capability for Drupal sites at Stanford.

There are two user interfaces for WebAuth Extras: the web GUI, and drush.

Stanford Sites Updates, September 2015

John Bickar — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 20:45:44 +0000

University IT will perform security updates on all websites on the Stanford Sites Drupal hosting service on the following dates:

Tuesday, September 1st, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.: personal sites hosted on people.stanford.edu; group and department sites hosted on sites.stanford.edu
Wednesday, September 2nd, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (if needed): group and department sites hosted on sites.stanford.edu

These changes include updating Drupal core to the latest release, security-related module upgrades, and bug fixes for both Drupal 6 and 7 sites. See below for a complete list of updated and new modules.

Stanford Sites Updates, July 2015

John Bickar — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 13:10:21 +0000

University IT will perform maintenance on all websites on the Stanford Sites Drupal hosting service on the following dates:

Friday, July 24th, from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.: personal sites hosted on people.stanford.edu
Saturday, July 25th, from 4 a.m. - 8 a.m.: group and department sites hosted on sites.stanford.edu
Sunday, July 26th, from 4 a.m. - 8 a.m.: group and department sites hosted on sites.stanford.edu

These changes are significant and include updating Drupal core to the latest release, security-related module upgrades, new modules, and theme updates for both Drupal 6 and 7 sites. See below for a complete list of updated and new modules.