I have a blog of my own. You can find out who is “me” and what is this blog about here and there.

And right now - couple of words about what it costed to me. Four days: two on design, two on customizing Wordpress. What was the idea? Well,  to start with - I wanted a standalone blog. If you pretend to be an IT blogger but are unable to build it with your own hands - are you really an IT man? Or ex-one who didn’t write a line of code for last …teen years?!

Secondly, these Wordpress themes - they are awfull. OK you may say they are “nice” and I’d agree to this but I couldn’t find a single one matching the following requirements:

• cross-browserness (behave well in IE6 in particular)
• fluid layout
• variable fonts

Sacrifying usability for pretty design is not for me.

I also wanted a bi-lingual blog and I didn’t see a chance to get it from blog hosters.

YUI helped a lot in design. The graphical part was made by a marker pen, a camera and Photoshop. Not pretty yet genuine.

Now about customization. It’s amazing but making the blog bilingual turned out to be the easiest part of the job: qTranslate runs smoothly right out of the box. Great job Qian Qin, thanks! Internationalization with gettext was an easy game too.

The biggest disappointment was the PHP code. I used default “kubrik” theme as a template and refactored it to implement my design and couple of features.

When it was done the theme code shrinked from 47k to 9k. Copypasting is a  popular development technique especially for PHP programmers so it’d be OK. But… please don’t put this proud “CODE IS A POETRY” writing on your site then (watch it on wordpress.org). Becaus that code wasn’t a poetry. I would not complain if it was about free themes: anyone can write them and I guess the most of writers are rather designers than coders. But the default theme should follow better coding standards I guess.

That’s all in brief. Ask here in comments if you want more details.