Author: dorkwriter

While catching up on some youtube videos for Hak5 I noticed that the host of the video had added a name banner at the top of his Linux Terminal. As usual instead of finishing the video I was currently watching I started to search online for methods on adding my own banner to the terminal to help me distinguish what system I am currently working on at a glance. It turns out you can make simple bash echo statements for simple ascii banners but an application named figlet (a command-line tool that creates ASCII text banners) seemed to pop up a lot while searching so figured I would give it a go instead of trying to track down rogue quotes in bash script.

As my Putty window shows I am connected to my linux server on my Raspberry Pi which happens to be running the Rasbian OS. If you want to follow along the below commands should work for any Debian based OS.

Verify Debian

If you would like to verify you are indeed using a Debian based linux disto you can run:

cat /etc/os-release

Install Figlet

To install Figlet on our Debian-based linux server we can use apt-get:

sudo apt-get install figlet

Test Figlet Output

Now that figlet is installed on our system let’s see how our name looks:

figlet "dorkwriter"

Time To Make This Permanent by Editing .bashrc

Since I am using the default bash shell, to add Figlet I need to edit .bashrc with my favorite editor nano.

nano ~/.bashrc

I will just add the following code to the bottom of my .bashrc file to generate the banner when bash first loads.

#Using figlet to generate a banner for my bash profile
figlet "dorkwriter"

Press Ctrl + X, Press Y, and then the Enter key to save the file.

Now every time you open a terminal you should get a cool ascii banner.

What Is A Favicon?

A favicon is simply the little icon that a site will display at the top of your browser window to help differentiate itself from the many other tabs you may have open in your browser. Its also another way for us as site creators to show our branding.

When favicon’s were first introduced 16×16 pixels was the recommended size to use. However, with new devices and higher resolution screens these days the number of “preferred” sizes seems to be a little harder to nail down. From my experience the 16×16 is still a safe bet as every device that supports favicons will use that image but if you were say using a new Ipad with a retina display there will be a noticable image quality difference but I don’t feel at this time it justifies juggling multiple favicon sizes. WordPress currently recommends a favicon size of 512×512 [https://wordpress.com/go/tutorials/favicon-tips-making-your-site-stand-out].

How To Add A Favicon To Your WordPress Site

In the menu on the left of the WordPress dashboard screen, Select Appearance and then Customize.

Then Select ‘Site Identity’ and scroll down to ‘Site Icon’ and select the button to upload/select an image to use as your site’s favicon.

When setting up new websites with a fresh install of WordPress the default homepage will be a rollup of pages that you create. This is usually not the desired presentation of your content and the quickest way I have of dealing with this out of box setup is to create a new page in WordPress and use this as my “homepage”

Steps To Setup

1. Create a new page via the WordPress dashboard

2. After saving your newly created page. Click on ‘Appearance -> Customize’ in the menu.

3. Click on ‘Homepage Settings’

4. Now Select the new page you setup for your site. In my example I named my new page “dorkwriter” to serve as my homepage.

And that my friends is how I setup a new page in WordPress and then changed my generatepress theme to use it as my new homepage.