Contentfree

(Note: I originally posted this on the Eachday Blog, where it was once #1 in the top 10 on Digg. Since then, another 1000 speech bubble logos have surely hatched)

It’s frothy out there in web round 2, assuming we’re in round 2, and all those bubbles really add to the effect. Each day, I see more than one new speech bubble logo. Am I the only one who thinks this has passed the point of group think, and entered the realm of comedy?

As a catch-all symbol, the speech bubble is tough to resist. It contains what everyone wants to say about the “new” web: user-generated, communication, collaboration, commenting, social media, community, self-published, my voice, our voice, rating, ranking, sharing and the rest. On top of that, it’s simple with a minimum of line, approachable and cuddly, and you can always count on people getting it. What more could a would-be communicator want?

But, it’s over. The day has come to pronounce from far and wide – “Attention all startups, it’s a bad idea to hang your ID hat on a speech bubble. Just don’t”

Here is just a fraction of what’s going down out there in Web Bubble Logo Land. This is what happens when the perfect symbol, a symbol so good that it does all the thinking for you, gets together with a sea of designers who aren’t thinking enough.

Our new site is up. An agency site not built in Flash? How can that be? It’s just bizarre.

Most git guides out there assume the new git user is smarter than me – or so it seems. As a longtime user of SVN that’s recently moved to Git, I’m busy breaking old habits (but the trivial branching and merging makes it all worth it).

For most of our projects here at Contentfree, we use a project management tool called Unfuddle. Their recent introduction of hosted git repositories made the switch a no-brainer. While all new projects use Git, we’ve slowly been migrating our existing projects from SVN to Git.

Both for my future reference and to help other newbs along, here’s simple steps to get an existing site into a new remote git repository.

My own assumptions are you’re familiar with a terminal shell and you have a new remote git repository. We’ll use http://domain.com/repo.git in the example.

So fire it up the shell and:

cd your_site_dir
git init

That will initialize a new .git directory. Next, add and commit the existing files

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit of existing files"

Note: If wanted to exclude some files, you’d create a .gitignore file before doing git add .. For example, if your project was previously in SVN – and you don’t care about the history – you could either remove all the .svn directories scattered about before adding the files to git or you could add .svn to .gitignore.

Now, we’ll add the fresh remote directory as a remote

git remote add origin http://domain.com/repo.git

Finally, we’ll push the local changes to the remote repository.

git push origin master

Initially, we have to provide the remote name, “origin,” and the local branch name, “master.” After the initial push, we’ll be able to just do git push.

It’s the same process whether you’re hosting your own git repository or using a service like GitHub. And that’s it. You’ve now got your existing site in a fresh remote git repository.

We are currently rearranging our mansion. Our interior decorator and landscape architect insisted that we do it within plain view of the neighbors, after refusing to do any planning in the sub directory servant’s wing of our compound.

So, uninvited guests may find the foyer in a state of disarray, or the sitting room, study, clay tennis courts and polo field entirely unfinished.

Our new chateau will be completed before our favorite writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, turns 108 on July 29, 2008.