the wrathful dove

Well, I could only stand Mephisto’s default simpla theme for so long. Now while I fully intend to create my own look for this blog in short order, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to provide a quick face lift especially after I managed to find a large list of custom themes available for Mephisto. I decided that riddish would do very nicely. It has a clean presentation and I like the usage of red in the theme.

When writing these posts and even more so while playing with the templates that define the look and feel of Mephisto, I much missed the syntax highlighting and editing capabilities of my favorite text editor vim. I did some digging around and found that with the installation of a suitable Firefox extension, I was able to have Firefox pop up vim to let me edit the contents of most text areas in the browser. Pretty convenient!

At some point in August last year, I found myself bitten by the blogging bug. However, being the somewhat neurotic perfectionist that I am, it has taken this long to finally get to writing a first post, and I still don’t have things the way that I like.

Despite the fact that there are a plethora of sites online that offer blogging services for anyone itching to publish their thoughts to the world, I decided that seeing as I run my own Gentoo Linux server at home, I would go through the trouble of setting up my own installation of a blogging tool. I figured that it would be a fun learning experience and that I would also enjoy the advantages of a fully customizable blog with no worries about having to rely on some corporate server to safeguard the stuff that I write. Call me silly, but I like having full control over my own data - especially if its going to be a journal like this one. Read more