title: The defaults link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/12/08/the-defaults/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 592 created: 2007/12/08 21:05:57 created_gmt: 2007/12/08 21:05:57 comment_status: open post_name: the-defaults status: publish post_type: post

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they start to wonder if all the tinkering and customizing has really been worth it, and, more importantly, whether it’s sustainable. Well, at least in the life of most techs.

Lately I’ve been doing this dance around all the customizations I’ve regularly done to various systems and softwares, where I just go and reset everything to the defaults. I did this most recently with Firefox on my CentOS workstation. Well, almost. Since I couldn’t bear to have the default font be “serif”, I set it to “sans-serif”. As it turns out, the pages of many sites actually seem to render better with this generic setting. Maybe the guys at Red Hat know what they’re doing after all.

In monkeying around with the presentation layer of my various web sites I followed the same course. Well, almost. For both eldapo and this site I’ve modified the Blog.txt theme slightly to reduce the size of text with the and

 tags (where the setting for font size/line height used to be ‘1em/133%’ I now have it at ‘.085em/120%’. Otherwise, I’ve pretty much returned everything to the theme’s defaults. Maybe Scott Allan Wallick (the author of the Blog.txt theme) knows what he’s doing after all.

Just a thought.

P.S. As everyone knows, if you spend any time at all using a Linux desktop, you’re incessantly tinkering with your web browser fonts. I was using the Liberation fonts for awhile, but removed them when I discovered they might be causing my browser to crash. For awhile I just left things at the default, but now I’ve got the DejaVu LGC fonts loaded up for serif and sans-serif, with old reliable Adobe Courier for monospace.

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