As any blogger, I worked more on the visuals, the icons, to prep-up this site with hardly any work on semantics (I didn’t know that word back in 2002, by the way). Ofcourse, during these last couple of years, I’ve grown fond of things on the inside (under the bonnet stuff) and have made efforts to keep it elegant there as well.

Between 2002 and now, I used Greymatter, Movabletype and now WordPress to power my blog. Greymatter was the easiest to setup among the three, as I was a newbie to owning a site and learning it’s internals. I created my first layout for it using table markup (something of a no-no, these days). Soon I realized that Greymatter wasn’t the ideal software to have a blog on and I promptly jumped to Movabletype. I did make one mistake though. I did not value my posts and started afresh. It pains me to this day that I lost some good posts there that would have defined my history of blogging, for blogging’s sake. Moving on from Movabletype to WordPress is almost history and has been meticulously recorded in my archives.

So, without further ado, here’s my timeline of a short list of themes used so far.

• Blogsome, http://www.blogsome.com/design.php
• Manpreet, http://dotmsb.com
• Gilly Furse, http://singingsun.com
• Miles Holliman, http://www.miles.holliman.net
• Laura Mulligan, http://www.cantkeepquiet.com
• Xavier Roy, http://xavierroy.com
• G Clark, http://www.catoptric.com/gclark
• Usualbitching, http://www.usualbitching.com
• Nicki Gemmel, http://nixit.co.nz/wordpress
• Curioser, http://curiouser.revise.org
• Niholas Kamau, http://www.pvrtracker.com
• Roy Lloyd Jones, http://www.roylloydjones.com
• John Keys, http://integralsource.com
• Isabel’s Journey, http://www.isabelcoupland.com
• Anyway the wind blows, http://www.anywaythewindblows.net
• Serendipity, http://www.serendipia.net/themes.php?id=30
• Stormycat’s blog, http://www.stormycat.org
• Infoprophecy, http://www.infoprophecy.org
• Blatherskite, http://www.pappergank.com/ms
• Yuan’s blog, http://www.yuan.web.ugm.ac.id/blog
• Kat, http://www.groovefunktion.com
• New World Border, http://www.newworldborder.com/journal
• Grendel’s kitchen, http://grendelskitchen.com
• Teewi, http://www.teewi.com

To my wife Sneha and I, it’s really nice to see many users personalizing this simple theme to their taste like the color, banners, image rollers, background images and even the links. That’s just wonderful. Are you using Plain Vanilla theme? Leave your blog address in the comments. Have fun, guys and thanks for using it.

Other than the obvious little tag about the creator that shows up only in the Admin console, there’s only one tiny commented line at the bottom (it’s visible only if you view source) in my set of theme files (easily removable, if you don’t want it there). It’s heartening to see many, many of them uncomment that line, so that it shows up in their sidebar, and many more have gone and added a detailed attribution linking my site back (some of which I discover via Technorati). Sometimes, Sneha and I sit back and look at some of the websites that are based on Plain Vanilla and how users have modified them to suit to their taste. It’s lovely.

Some stats: Plain Vanilla has been downloaded over a thousand times from this site alone. I don’t know about how many times from Alex King’s theme competition site. Oh, the joy of sharing.

Among other things, I’m trying to get a package including the archives page, and the custom error page as the guys mentioned in one of my previous post comments. I also have a few background images where the sidebar is colored, and may radically change the way your blog might look. All one needs to do is change the filename of the background image in the style.css file. I’ll package them and release them shortly.

I’m also trying to upload this theme to SVN based WP-Themes.org without luck. I don’t have the time to rtfm. I have Tortoise SVN client for Windows, but in the limited time I tried, I couldn’t upload the theme files (I’ve got a login provided by Matt). Is this how it works?

<!-- start links -->
<?php /* If this is the frontpage */ if ( is_home()
|| is_page() ) { ?>                   

 <?php
 $link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id,
cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
 foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
 ?>
  <h3><?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?></h3>
   <ul>
     <?php wp_get_links($link_cat->cat_id); ?>
   </ul>
   <?php } ?>

<!-- end links -->

Still better, download the theme again, if you like.

• Download Plain Vanilla 1.1 theme for WordPress.
• Download Plain Vanilla theme Background images for WordPress.

You could hack this GPL’d template to glory if you keep the basic structure the same (page divisions and other hacks that take care of cross-browser issues). You could change the banner image on the fly, add a header image within h1 tags, say, representing your site logo (just adjust top margins in #header h1 and #nav ul to keep both the logo and the navigation bar in the same line, as you see on this site). Open nav.php and add your other site related links.

Feel like adding more pizzaz to the banner? Look-up Dan Benjamin’s wonderful article and script to roll images of your choice on your site. Still better, use a Flickr script that’s just dead easy.

Mtv, enjoy!