Write your commit comments in the past tense, when others view them, it will be in the past and when you commit, it will be work you did prior to committing and should be a summary. Some people use a "CATEGORY: message" format, so for example:
BUGFIX: Resolved file error
DOC: Fixed README.md
ENHANCE: Added more cowbell
BUGFIX: fixed crash on http read
CLEANUP: removed old tests
This works well for documentation but limiting the categories obviously helps. In addition it is worth reading How to Write a Git Commit Message which has some good advice.
Git over https works quite happily behind a proxy server. If there is a proxy setup for your browser then you will most likely need to use a proxy for git, especially if it is hosted externally. Fortunately this is easy to do, simply execute the following, with the correct details, of course:git config --global http.proxy http://10.21.43.195:8080
On Linux git will respect the standard environment variables if you have them set.