One of the main reasons why I rarely add new features to this site is that my development environment has always sucked rocks. When I want to make changes, I generally ssh into my shell account on the Web server, hack on the pages some using the antiquated version of vim that pair.com has installed, and pray that everything works like it’s supposed to when I’m done. Every once in awhile I download files and work on them on a local machine, but that’s rare. Anyway, last week I picked up a new old PC from my former employer, and after offering it to my wife (who, it turns out, is still holding out for a Mac), I installed my beloved Gentoo Linux on it and endeavored to set it up as a playground for personal projects like this site.

Now I have Linux, Apache, MySQL, CVS, and a bunch of other nifty stuff running on my own personal server, and thanks to dyndns.org and the port forwarding features of my LinkSys box, I have the ability to get to it from anywhere via the Web or SSH. I’m still messing around with the MySQL configuration a bit, but by and large, things are going swimmingly. Now I have one less excuse why I don’t hack on this site as much as I should — we’ll see how this turns out.