However, with so many different themes out there and new ones being added daily, I find it hard to keep up. More importantly, having so many choices makes me fickle and apt to change themes frequently. As a result, I spend more time trying themes rather than writing.

Therefore I’ve declared a six month moratorium on changing my blog themes. I’ve adopted a suitably named theme called plaintxt by Scott Wallick of Barthelme fame. It’s boringly plain but easy on the eyes and I feel good for content which I hope to create more of in the next couple of months. I’m toying around with the idea of adding theme links to my del.ici.ous account and then trying them out after my six month hiatus. I’m a big fan of really simple themes with lots of white space good for text. One design I recently found quite impressive was http://www.youtilize.com/. It’s the kind of clean design I really like and I hope that one day the author open sources the design.

I literally began clicking through this list until I came across a design called Conestoga Street by Theron Parlin. The theme caught my eye because it is very simple using a white background with black texts and selective coloring to highlight post titles, links and meta data. I also liked the fact that a single vertical bar separated the posts from the menu information on the right. I knew that I wanted to use a few Wordpress plugins to display information on the right but I didn’t want it to look to cluttered by having the side bar boxed in.

Tweaking the design took a few hours of fiddling with the Theme editor but I think I have something usable and easily skinnable. Once I have some time I might investigate writing a script which would allow me to change the css stylesheet depending on the time of day so a visitor would see a different color scheme as the day wears on.

That is unless I get bored with this design and find something else.