Strip <span> tags from HTML in vim

Posted on April 6, 2009

When upgrading a website you might see source code like this:

<span style="font-family: Arial; color: #0000ff; font-size: small;">Some text goes here</span>

You’re using CSS now and all those <span> tags are ruining it. In gvim, do this search and substitute:

%s/<span.\{-}>//g

Then to get rid of the </span> tags, do this:

:%s/<\/span>//g

Batch reduce resolution of images in Ubuntu Linux

Posted on February 22, 2009

Open a terminal window or shell (who needs a GUI!?)
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
cd image_folder
mkdir resized
for f in *jpg
do
convert -resize 30% $f resized/$f
done

Easier than Photoshop, I reckon!

I needed this today for some photos I was uploading. Photos from recent cameras are huge and Australian bandwidth doesn’t cut it. So this really helps.

Obviously you only need to do the first line once. I found this in the Ubuntu forums but it took me a while to find the right combination of keywords in Google. View the original thread.

I needed to change jpg to JPG, because the camera used uppercase and Linux is case-sensitive. 30% was good for me but you may need to change that.

If you don’t understand this, ask me, I’m happy to help!