Nepherte (dot) be » Nepherte.be

SVN read access

Nepherte — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:52:09 +0000

I’ve enabled guest read access to my svn repository. For the moment only the directory holding my arch linux’ pkgbuilds is accessible by guests but more subrepositories may come available depending on the free time I have.

You can access the svn repository by browsing to https://svn.ulyssis.org/repos/nepherte/pkgbuilds. You will have to authorize yourself with the credentials: user “guest” and password “guest”.

You can of course do a plain chechout. Simply run the following command in a console:

svn checkout https://svn.ulyssis.org/repos/nepherte/pkgbuilds pkgbuilds --username "guest" --password "guest"

Nepherte.be moved

Nepherte — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:06:55 +0000

I’ve finally moved Nepherte.be to a different host. I’ve complained about my previous host in the past and acted upon it, albeit a couple months later. The website, domain name included, now resides back on the servers of ulyssis, an it student organization affiliated with K.U. Leuven, my university. I’ve hosted sites there before and the service has been impeccable so far. More interestingly, they also offer ssh access to their servers and a personal svn repository, 2 services I can really use.

It’s the first time I’ve actually moved an active, online site to another host and the whole process was surprisingly easy. It doesn’t take a computer science engineer to do it, though that is exactly what I am studying. I hope visitors didn’t encounter any problems and I don’t think they did. I will soon make a couple svn subrepositories available with some of my work.

On vacation

Nepherte — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:05:38 +0000

The best days of the year have arrived: great weather, a lot of interesting cultural trips, beautiful nature and no computers around. Yup, I’m on vacation. I haven’t been able to notify you any earlier, nor was I able to complete the article about configuring XMonad as promissed (although it’s almost done). You don’t have to expect any activity in the near future.

On and sidenote: I noticed a lot of server downtime. I’m a very unsatisfied custumor and plan to move this site to another provider or host the site myself on my dedicated server as soon as I have the time.

Greetings from Slovakia.

How could I ever overlook this: syntax highlighting

Nepherte — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:09:48 +0000

Because of the nature of this blog, I tend to include a lot of linux commands into my articles. That’s just the way linux is, or at least for me. For obvious reasons, it is preferable that these linux commands stand out from everything else, to differentiate commands from normal text. For that I always used a self made code tag styled with a css entry. Nothing more, nothing less.

Over the passed few days I was looking for a better solution, i.e. to color the commands depending on what type of language the command belongs to, and stumbled upon wp-syntax. It’s everything I ever wanted to style my commands: it provides clean syntax highlighting, supporting a range of programming languages and more importantly, all the languages I program in. It’s also capable of numbering each line in case you have a bunch of bundled code. So now my wordpress installation is equiped with wp-syntax and right now I don’t even wanna think of all the linux commands in my postings I wil have to convert. I suppose I’ll start with the most popular posts and go from there.

New design in use

Nepherte — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:12:12 +0000

As announced earlier, I launched the new look of Nepherte (dot) be today. I’m very pleased with the final result. I’d say it’s a vast improvement over the old design mainly because it’s wider and a lot more minimalistic (I’m a huge fan of minimalistic designs). The featured section is also a great way of putting the spotlight on specific articles. The theme in use is Equilibrium made by On. I slightly edited the layout of the front page to fit my needs but credit where credit’s due: On did a terrific job.

As always, I appreciate any input on the design: things that can be improved, a different layout, color scheme, … You name it. Just leave a message and I’ll consider the remarks, when possible.

Ditching the old look of Nepherte.be

Nepherte — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:48:09 +0000

I’ve been thinkering for a while now to change the design of the site. The current design, while visually very appealing, poses a couple of practical limitations. For one, it has a fixed width. A rather not so large width to be precisely. It doesn’t allow for long structured postings with many commands to show how some things are done in linux. Eventually, these long posts are doomed to occupy a great height of the site.

Another limitation is adding fixed pages. The top right menu contains only 3 horizontal items with a fixed graphically coded text, namely ‘Home’, ‘About’ and ‘Archives’. Though I could also code them in a right side menus such as ‘Recent Posts’ or ‘Categories’, they don’t belong there conceptually speaking. The coding itself is not a problem (I guess studying engineering in computer science finally pays off), it would also require creating some extra graphics, something I’m not very good at.

Therefore I decided to drop the current design, Notepad Chaos, and go with a new one. The search for a new theme can be very cumbersome like today. There are hundreds of site with free wordpress templates, most of them plain ugly. My demands and preferences don’t make it easier for me either. Fortunately I stumbled upon a site (Blog Perfume) with more qualitive themes, at least that’s what I think, where I found my new theme. It will take a little while before the new look is in use. I still have to make some changes in the php code to be sure the site looks exactly the way I want it to be. The next post will probably be in the new look. See you then.