the wrathful dove

My last attempt at a theme for this blog resulted in something that was too hard to read. At the time, I figured I would return to my theme at some point and solve its readability issues, but alas I have been simply too busy with work at my new job to take a stab at it. So over the last few days of vacation, I tried my hand at quickly producing a new theme. I think the result is something that is easy to read and sufficiently bleak for my aesthetic tastes.

I decided that seeing as I was moving from Mephisto to WordPress, I should take the time to revamp the look of my website. I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the flat and old-fashioned style of my old theme, and I also was starting to find the color scheme a little harsh on the eyes. Despite my love for hurling politically significant colors at my visitors, the good old red and black look just wasn’t cutting it for me.

Finally, although I will continue to make reference to my anarchist political beliefs in these pages, I decided that it may be counterproductive to litter the pages with symbols of Christianity, anarchism and communism that scream at you from every corner. Sure, if a sympathetic reader comes to my site, they will feel at home with the symbolism, but your average Joe, who might at some point find that he agrees with a lot of the ideas that form the basis for anarchist thought, might never get that far because when he comes to the site and sees a bunch of freaky symbols, his knee jerk reaction might be to leave posthaste for greener blogging pastures.

So instead of the whole Christo-anarchism-run-amok theme, I have now turned towards instead simply striving for something I find aesthetically pleasing.

I hope you like it as well.

Expect subtle changes as I continue to work on improving readability in a few troublesome places over the next few days.

In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.
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