GitHub Tutorial Update

image for 'GitHub Tutorial Update' post

The good news is, my “Remove Files From GitHub” tutorial is showing up in a lot of search results….an average of 1400 appearances a month. The not-so-good news is, the click-throughs are low…an average of 25 a month.

That being said, that’s a lot of appearances and I should look at this as an opportunity. So as I mentioned in a recent post, I’m updating this tutorial with the hopes of making it more SEO/SEM friendly and upping the click-throughs.

The updates are as follows:

  • Added, updated and removed copy: make it more to the point, less verbose.

  • Got rid of all the images: the previous post contained a lot of screenshots of both terminal commands and my GitHub repo. The terminal screenshots have been replaced with syntax highlighting and the repo shots have been deleted in full. This will make the post not only easier to read, but will also make it load faster. And as an added bonus, less images means less charges against my MaxCDN account.

  • Rewrote the meta description: the goal here was to rewrite the description so people would be more enticed to click through to whole post. There was a technical catch with this: the old meta description was still embedded in the Open Graph network and needed to be replaced with the new one. This was done with the Facebook Debugger…sometimes known as the URL Linter.

  • Added some new links to the resource list at the end: props to lynda.com and Tim Pope.

View the updated post here.

The original post can be seen on GitHub. Some raw code appears in some places but it’s still readable.

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