I recently had to move 35,000+ website images from Git to AWS S3. The images were in many subfolders. First, I had to separate the images from all other files. Then, when I tried dragging and dropping the parent folder containing all images to the AWS S3 web interface, I had to wait 9 to 17 hours.
When I woke up in the morning, I found the upload completed with errors:
Here’s how I easily separated the images from all other files and successfully uploaded all 35,000+ images.
Separate images from other files
First, I wanted to see a list of all unique file extensions so I could know what image file extensions were being used.
find . -type f | sed 's|.*.||' | sort -u
This returned a list like the one below.
JPG PNG ali bmp brs cnd CSS ...
Then, I copied the website root folder and made a new sibling folder called website-images where I’d just have the images.
Then, I deleted all images from the “website” folder using the following command.
As mentioned earlier, uploading 35000 images to S3 using the web interface took a long time and kept completing with errors. What ended up working was uploading the images using the AWS CLI. Here’s how I did it.
I had to create an access key to authenticate. I created a new Identity and Access Management (IAM) user and then clicked the “Create access key” button to generate a new key.
I then saved those key values as environment variables. Here are the instructions. I basically ran the following commands in the terminal, replacing the values with my actual values.
For the default region, I chose the region for my S3 bucket.
Upload (sync) files
I then uploaded (synced) files from my local to my remote S3 bucket. Here’s the documentation for the S3 sync command. Since I had already uploaded some files, I was hoping to find a flag to skip uploading files that exist at the destination. It turns out that the “sync” command does this by default. I ran the following command in dry-run mode to verify the output was correct.
Then, I reran the command without the dry-run flag.
aws s3 sync . s3://q-website-images/docs/
The command output a list of the files it uploaded.
When it was done, I tried rerunning the command only to find that it completed with no output, indicating that all source files already existed in the destination. That was a sign that the sync was complete. Looking at the number of files in the S3 web console, I could see the correct number of files listed there.
Now that the images are in S3, I’ll use S3 as the origin for an image CDN (ImageKit). ImageKit will auto-optimize the images.
For me, my maintenance calories is currently 2650 calories per day.
Step 2: Calculate Calories & Protein to Lose Weight and Build Muscle
Losing Weight (Fat)
In order to lose weight by losing fat, you just need one thing: a net deficit of calories. But you don’t want too large a deficit because then you’ll lose both fat and muscle. You should target a deficit of 5 to 10% of your maintenance calories. You can lose weight by just consuming fewer calories or consuming more calories but burning extra calories by doing cardio exercises like running. Whether you just rest or you do cardio, your net calorie deficit should be 5 to 10% of your maintenance calories. For me, this value is currently between 2385 and 2517 calories.
Gaining Muscle
In order to gain muscle, you need 4 things:
a net surplus of calories
strength training until failure
sufficient protein consumption
rest (minimum 7 hours a day)
For the calories, you don’t want too large a surplus because then you’ll gain both muscle and fat. You should target a surplus of 5 to 15% of your maintenance calories. For me, this value is currently between 2782 and 3047 calories.
For the protein, you should target consuming 1 gram of protein for each pound of body weight. So, if you weigh 180 lbs, you should consume 180 grams of protein.
The calorie (energy / fuel) surplus is needed to rebuild the muscle you’ve broken down during strength training. Breaking down muscle fibers only happens if you train to failure. The large protein consumption is needed because muscles are made of protein. Muscle (protein) synthesis occurs while you’re sleeping, which is why it’s necessary to sleep enough after strength training.
Your weekly schedule would be a combination of resting days, cardio days, and strength training (weight lifting) days. Here’s an example.
DAY
ACTIVITY
CALORIES
Monday
Rest
Calorie Deficit, Extra Protein
Tuesday
Strength Training
Calorie Surplus, Extra Protein
Wednesday
Cardio
Calorie Deficit, Extra Protein
Thursday
Rest
Calorie Deficit, Extra Protein
Friday
Strength Training
Calorie Surplus, Extra Protein
Saturday
Cardio
Calorie Deficit, Extra Protein
Sunday
Strength Training
Calorie Surplus, Extra Protein
Step 4: Make a Meal Plan
When it comes to losing weight, you just need a calorie deficit, but you should consume healthy calories, e.g. no processed food, no added sugar, etc. For me, I try to stick to a keto diet, although that’s not absolutely necessary.
When it comes to building muscle, the hardest part will be trying to consume sufficient protein. If you weigh 180 lbs, you need to consume 180 grams of protein. That’s actually hard to do, which is why many people consume protein shakes to supplement their meals.
Here’s a list of protein-dense foods that can help you reach your protein consumption target.
Since the hardest thing is consuming enough protein, the meal plan below will focus on foods that will hit the target protein amount of 180 without consuming an excess of calories. If there is a calorie deficit, you can easily add any kind of healthy food to reach the calorie target.
For cardio, you can do anything from hiking, dancing, running, biking, etc. If you’re low on time, you can buy a recumbent exercise bike with resistance. It lets you lay back and exercise in a comfortable position. The one below is lightweight and small and costs $178. You can easily put it in your living room and use it while watching TV.
Playing certain types of music can be motivating and make exercising more enjoyable. Many people wear bulky on-ear headphones. I prefer in-ear neckband earphones because they don’t move around and are lightweight. They also block out ambient sounds pretty well. I wear the Sony Wireless Behind-Neck Headset (WI-C400).
Workout gloves
If you don’t wear padding gloves, you can easily develop calluses (thickened skin that forms as a response to repeated friction or pressure). Lifting weights is much more comfortable while wearing padded gloves.
Step 6: Count Calories
For calorie consumption, you can count calories by adding up all calories for each ingredient or food you consume. Look at the nutrition label on food packaging and/or look at online calorie databases.
To see how inaccurate a smartwatch measures calories burned, today I used both my Fossil Gen X watch with the Google Fit watch app to track calories burned. I also used the Polar H10 chest strap. I did strength training for 1 hr 10 mins. When I started tracking on my watch, I chose “indoor workout” and the phone app just started tracking calories, time spent, heart rate, etc. When I started tracking using the Polar H1 app on my phone, I was able to choose “Strength training” before the device started tracking vitals. Once I was done exercising, I stopped both apps. As you can see below, the smartwatch says “Run”, which I guess means it thought I was running on a treadmill. It also says I burned 482 calories. In the Polar H10 app on my phone, it says I burned 759 calories. That’s way more than 482, with a difference of 277 calories. While I was exercising, I had my Bluetooth earphones on. The Polar H10 app would send an audio message like “You are improving your fitness” or “You are burning fat”. It would say the former when I was doing strength training and the latter when I was resting.
Step 7: Measure Progress
Weight Loss Progress
Measuring your weight lost is easy. Just regularly weight yourself. To automate this, buy a wi-fi scale that record and keep track of your weight and show a graph of your progress on your phone. I personally use the Withings Body – Digital Wi-Fi Smart Scale with Automatic Smartphone App Sync. If weighing yourself every day, make sure to do it right before bed or first thing in the morning for more accurate results.
Muscle Gain Progress
To track your muscle gain, you’ll need to track your strength training weights, reps and sets for each exercise. Personally, I log my workouts using the free version of the FitNotes app. It’s a simple and easy-to-use app that just works. I can easily see my most recent reps and weights so I can either match or exceed them.
If you are able to lift heavier weights and perform more reps, then you must be building muscle, even if it’s not immediately noticeable in the mirror. You can also try measuring the circumference of different parts of your body, e.g. your upper arm, but that’s a hassle and inaccurate if your measure right after a workout when your muscles are swollen.
Over time, you can compare your strength training limits to see progress. Below is an example showing my actual results.
Google Analytics version 4 (GA4) is quite different than the previous version, called Universal Analytics (UA). GA4 is event-based, and the UI is quite different. If you’ve got a link with UTM parameters like
In GA4, if you go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens, you will see stats like pageviews for many pages. You can then filter to just one page like a free trial page by entering the page’s path in the search field, e.g. “/free-trial/”. You can then add a secondary dimension for source and medium. What you’ll end up will be something like this
This may not include the source and medium in your UTM parameters. A better way to get the traffic report based on a specific source and medium or name is by going to Explorations.
Here, you can create a new exploration. In the left “Variables” column
give the exploration a name like “Feb 2023 Campaign”
add some dimensions like
Page path and screen class
Session campaign
Session source / medium
add some metrics like “Views” and “Sessions”
In the middle “Settings” column,
drag some or all dimensions from the left column to the “Rows” field
drag some or all metrics from the left column to the “Values” field
add some filters like
Session source / medium contains market
Session campaign contains “Feb 2023 Campaign”
You will then see the report on the right.
Here’s the mapping between UTM query parameter and UTM dimension in GA4.
To find the number of clicks on a link with a UTM, go to
Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition
In the primary dimension, choose session source or session medium or session campaign
In the Search field, enter a value for the session source or session medium or session campaign
Choose a date range
Scroll to the right and under “Event count”, choose “click”.
In Google Earth Pro for Desktop, you can record a tour in real time by clicking the navigation controls or by clicking on saved placemarks. However, unless you are just moving from one point to another, the resulting tour may not be as smooth as you’d like. For example, if you have three placemarks, then as you click each placemark while recording the tour, the transition between placemarks will not be smooth.
To create a smooth tour that appears as if you are flying a plane or drone at a fixed altitude along a multipoint path, you need to create a path in Google Earth. Here’s an example. Let’s say we want to fly along the Las Vegas Strip.
Change Settings
Go to Tools > Options > Touring and change the settings as in this screenshot. Make sure to click the “Apply” button and the “OK” button to save your changes.
Now, click the “Navigation” tag and change the settings to match this screenshot.
Create Path
When adding a path, your mouse pointer will turn into a crosshair and you will need click to add points along your desired path. In this mode, you will not be able to zoom, change altitude, direction or pan by clicking on the screen because doing so would add path points. If you need to move around, you’ll need to use the navigation controls.
When creating a path, I find it easier to have your view facing straight down to the ground like this. In this example, my starting point will be just south of the south end of the Strip before the Mandalay Bay.
Click Add > Path
A dialog window will pop up. We’ll name the path “Las Vegas Strip”. Let’s also specify the altitude we want our flight path to be from the ground.
Click the “Altitude” tab.
Set Altitude to “400m” for 300 meters.
Make sure “Relative to ground” is selected.
Click to add path points
In the screenshot below, you’ll see that I created 3 points. From bottom to top, there’s 2 red points and 1 blue point.
Since I need to pan to the north to add more points along the Strip, I will use the navigation control up arrow to do so.
After adding all the last point (just north of the STRAT), I zoomed out to check the entire path. As you can see, all but the last point are red and the path curves to the right as it goes north.
Now that my path is done, I’ll click the OK button in the path dialog window. That adds the path to My Places.
Since I don’t want to see the white path line / curve, I’ll uncheck the checkbox next to the path name.
To play the path tour, just click the path Play Tour button, as shown below.
If you’re happy with how the tour looks, you can record it by clicking the “Record a Tour” button and then click the Play Tour button.
Then click Tools > Movie Maker to export the video.
In my 12 years working in Marketing, I’ve see a few different organizational structures at both low and high levels. And in my particular role, I’ve had to work with pretty much everyone, which has given me exposure to many issues that often go unnoticed. While there are many ways you can structure an organization, whatever way you come up should always make sense based on your particular organization’s needs. Following is a structure that I think makes sense based on my experience. The specific job titles (chief, VP, director, manager, senior vs junior, etc) are just an example. The important thing is that the structure and hierarchy groups people by function, commonality and importance. The structure below is for a 2000+ employee organization. Obviously, if your organization is much smaller or larger and has more or less dependencies on particular functions, some positions and groups can be removed or consolidated or even divided and expanded.
Level 1:
CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) or CPO (Chief Product Officer)
Level 2:
VP of Marketing
VP of Product
Level 3 and 4
Director of Content (or similar name)
This functional group primarily deals with marketing activities that involve text content. Since a big part of SEO involves text content, I put SEO Expert in this group.
Public Relations Expert(s)
Copyediting Expert(s)
Proofreading Expert(s)
SEO Expert(s)
Social Media Expert(s)
etc
Director of Design (or similar name, e.g. creative, etc)
This functional group primarily deals with marketing activities that involve visual design. Brand has to do with a company’s external public image, which relates to both public relations and design. Depending on your preference, this role could be under this “design” group or the “content” group above.
Graphic Designer Expert(s)
Web Designer Expert(s)
Brand Expert(s)
Video Expert(s)
UI / UX Expert(s)
etc
Director of Web (or similar name)
This functional group primarily deals with marketing activities that involve websites. Due to the criticality and complexity of today’s websites, significant dependencies that all functional groups often have on a company’s website, and unique technical skills that members of this group have, I made this group a standalone group rather than a subset of another group. Also, since email marketing is very effective, and because HTML emails contain code like that used on a website, I put HTML Email Expert(s) in this group. Though many marketing automation tools like Marketo include an email builder tool, I’ve found that they are limited in features and produce emails that don’t look professional unless the user has web development skills.
HTML, CSS Expert(s)
JavaScript Expert(s)
WordPress Expert(s)
HTML Email Expert(s)
etc
Director of Marketing Operations (or similar name)
This functional group primarily deals with marketing activities that involve marketing automation tools like Marketo, revenue attribution tools like Bizible, data analysis and reporting tools like Tableau and Google Analytics, customer relationship management tools like Salesforce, lead processing and routing, etc.
Marketing Automation, e.g. Marketo Expert(s)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), e.g. Salesforce, Experts
Reporting and Data Analysis Expert(s)
etc
Director of Channel Marketing (or similar name, e.g. demand generation)
This functional group primarily deals with marketing activities that fall under certain channels like events, e g. virtual or in-person conferences, partner marketing, etc, and demand generation activities like advertising campaigns such as Google Pay Per Click (PPC), email marketing, digital media marketing, print advertising, etc.
Event & Event Marketing Expert(s)
Partner Marketing Experts(s)
Google PPC Expert(s)
Campaigns Expert(s)
etc
Director of Product (or similar name)
This functional group primarily deals with product management and product-specific marketing. For example, many tech companies have multiple products. Each product requires a specific subject matter expert, as it may be uncommon to find someone who is an expert in multiple products. Each product expert (commonly called “product manager”) basically is responsible for their own product, from understanding their product’s customers’ needs, making product feature decisions, helping market a product, e.g. by writing product page content, product-related blog posts, giving product-related webinars, etc.
Product Expert for Product A
Product Marketing Expert for Product A
Product Expert for Product B
Product Marketing Expert for Product B
etc
Project Manager
There is one role that doesn’t quite fit in any of the categories above. Needless to say, many marketing activities require the collaboration of multiple functional groups, but each of these groups specialize in their own areas. There’s no such thing as a person or group who specializes (or is even interested) in everything. One big issue I often see is how certain marketing activities with a specific hard deadline, e.g. due to an earnings release or predetermined and pre-marketed event taking place, results in chaos, with many people working nights and weekends due to lack of planning, ownership and project management. That’s why there’s a particular title called Project Manager (PM) or Project Management Professional (PMP) and a certification where people can get a PMP certificate. These people don’t specialize in the various components that go into a project, but rather they keep a project on track to avoid delays, mistakes, oversight, etc. Sometimes, they have the boring task of having to keep reminding people to do their part to avoid delays caused by blocking subsequent tasks. Assigning a random person to be a temporary project manager may work for small projects involving few people, but for large projects involving many people, a “real” project manager who actually specializes in project management is needed.
Title Hierarchy
Here’s a title hierarchy commonly used in many companies.
Personal opinion: the wave pool isn’t impressive. There’s only one wave every few minutes. The lazy river is small, but it has a strong current, which is nice.
Personal Opinion: This is a relatively small waterpark compared to the ones I’ve tried in Orlando, FL. However, it wasn’t crowded, which meant lines were short. There was a decent variety of rides and they were all fun. The wave pool creates large waves every 5 minutes and they last for maybe 5 minutes. Definitely a lot of fun as the strong waves can push you towards the beach. The lazy river is of decent length, however, the current wasn’t very strong.
Take free tram to Luxor and Excalibur or walk through the enclosed walkway
Luxor
Opened in 1993
4400 rooms
Take pictures of Egyptian architectural theme
Titanic Artifact Exhibition Apr 27 – Sep 4 | 11 AM – 8 PM; Last admission 7 PM Sep 8 – Nov 12 | 11 AM – 6 PM; Last admission 5 PM Nov 13 – Dec 31 | 11 AM – 8 PM; Last admission 7 PM $32
Bodies… The Exhibition Apr 27 – Sep 4 | 11 AM – 8 PM; Last admission 7 PM Sep 8 – Nov 12 | 11 AM – 6 PM; Last admission 5 PM Nov 13 – Dec 31 | 11 AM – 8 PM; Last admission 7 PM $32
See Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere FRIDAY – TUESDAY* 2 Shows | 7 p.m. & 9:30 p.m. Arrive 30 mins early for pre-show entertainment Actual performance time is approximately 90 mins $64 – $135
The way it works is you clamp the clamp onto your eaves, secure the hooks to the hole on the clamp, then wrap the straps around your ladder, securing it using the hook and loop velcro.
It’s a simple idea, but the price is $90. It just went on sale for $56, but that still seems overpriced. Not sure why Harbor Freight hasn’t created a cheaper alternative.
Anyway, you can probably make your own for much less by just using
For an easy-to-transport ladder, this telescoping ladder ($160) is great.
If you need this for your own home and there is one spot where you would always use to get on the roof, and if you want a more secure solution, replace the C-clamp with a large screw eye or eye bolt with nut and use the ratchet straps instead of the cam buckle strap.
I’m currently migrating a large website from Handlebars to Nunjucks. Since the website is being updated daily, and because there are too many pages, I can’t convert the Handlebars syntax to Nunjucks syntax manually. To solve this, I started writing a script to convert the syntax programmatically using JavaScript (nodeJS). So far, it’s working very well. Here’s how I’m doing it, and how you can do something similar when confronted with a migration project.
Basically, the way it works is
it recursively finds all files in a folder called “temp”
if the file path ends with “hbs” – indicating it is a Handlebars file – then for each file, it executes a series of regex search and replace commands, e.g.
replace {{#if class}} with {% if class %}
replace {{/if}} with {% endif %}
and so on.
Those are simple search-and-replace situations. There may be a situation where you’ll need an advanced search and replace, e.g. when replacing
{{> social-list
dark="true"
centered="true"}}
with
{% set dark="true" %}
{% set centered="true" %}
{% include social-list.njk %}
In this case, you can use a “replacer” function, which allows you to do much more to manipulate the output.
When you’re all done and you’ve built the HTML files from both the handlebars templates and the nunjucks templates, you can write a script that recursively reads all HTML files in the build output folder and lists each HTML file path generated from each handlebars and nunjucks template along with their respective file size. The file sizes should be the same or almost the same. If some are not, then the migration script didn’t convert those templates correctly. Maybe something like:
