Ok, to be exact I start making the theme change since late December 2008. I have been searching for a nice theme to put up for a long time and I have tried a lot of other themes.

The problem with other themes is not that they don’t work, but rather the difficulty for me to make it look the way I want it to. Sometimes, the widgets in my dynamic sidebar will not appear properly even when no modification is needed. But the worst of it all is even after I managed to modify the style.css and the various .php files that deals with the output, they didn’t really quite live up to my expectations, nor did they appeal to my regular readers.

For a moment, I was using this theme, as I liked the drop-down menus, and the fading sidebar. Even while some of my friends who did me the favour of checking it out liked the new look, their feedback was that they would prefer something less cluttered, or in one particular case actually asked if I can make it look like the mirror blog I had on xanga. I had to agree with them, as the background picture did take a bit of time to download on a slow connection.

Thus I began my search for a new theme with the objective that they must have drop-down menus with a cleaner look. That is why I dropped a few of them even when I do like their look, for e.g. the Varg theme. I liked the background pictures a lot which is why I have taken them out of that theme and used it in the current one. Of course the lack of drop-down menus wasn’t the only reason I dropped this theme, but rather the 3 column layout, not to mention I am too lazy to tinker with the style.css to make it 2 columns. The main reason I won’t use a 3 column layout, is that I am unwilling to go through several years of blog post to make them 3 column compatible.

So I went searching again, and It was by chance I stumble on this new theme called bullit, created by miloIIIIVII.

It took me several hours over a period of 2 days to figure out the functions of some parts of the style.css and make the necessary modifications. I did this by changing the stylesheet line by line to see the effect of the changes since I am almost clueless about css. Everything appears to be well until I applied the theme. This is when I discovered this rather irritating problem: When readers comment, all they get is a blank page even though the comment has been accepted. On top of which, I can only log in to my admin page by renaming the theme folder or moving it to another location.

I wrote back to the theme’s creator via email and not expecting a reply, since it is provided out of goodwill, and I also had a bad experience with plugin makers previously.

Several days went by and there was indeed no reply from the theme’s creator. By then I have by chance figured out the exact cause of the problem, after reading pages and pages of unrelated text on the WordPress forum. It has dawned on me that a set of instructions in the functions.php file which adds a function in the admin page is the cause. By remarking that section of, everything would at least appear to work properly – at least I think it is working properly since I can’t find anything to show it isn’t. After all, I am not .php trained and I would have no clue if my ‘indigenous patch’ had broken the theme in some other places.

It was a pleasant surprise when on the 1st Jan 2009 itself I get a reply from the theme maker, who has since modified the functions.php file and sent it to me. And now I have a fully functional theme without my own patches.

I would like to express my gratitude to miloIIIIVII, and also my appreciation to Carro of the Varg Theme – without it there would be no nice wolf pictures that now mark the header and footers of the blog, to leen of The-Scenary theme whose drop-down menu inspired me to lookout for themes with similar effects. Without them, I would not have been able to get to this point in making my blog better.

Please do check out their sites / blogs and see if there are anything you like. Do also give them some encouragement if you like. I am not suggesting that you are to expect exceptional support from these theme creators, but rather simply as a token of appreciation to all these people out there.