I decided to take the advice Jeff Atwood gave to a commenter who asked for advice on blog post ideas on a recent Lifehacker interview.

After I decided to start a blog I first needed to decide what software or service I was going to use. Blogger and other similar services are easy to get started with, but since I am a developer I like to have more control over a site I’m running. I already had some WordPress experience so the decision was quite easy after all.

Next thing I started thinking about was the theme. I have always liked a minimal design so I can do most of the work in a text editor rather than Photoshop or similar image editor. The WordPress default theme (twenty eleven at the time) was a good starting point. It is mostly black and white, it has a clean and minimalist look and it’s responsive, which is also something I wanted to get more experience with. I started out by creating a child theme and gathering some ideas. Since I am not that creative visually, my design process is mostly combining and tweaking ideas and concepts I like from other sites I have seen and using them to a create a design I like and that I can call my own.

Here are some of the things I customized from the default theme: search in menu bar, meta fields on the left, round RSS, Twitter & LinkedIn buttons in header, use Font Awesome for icons, use custom fonts from Google Web Fonts and also numerous small tweaks and style changes.

The source code for this theme is available at GitHub, so you can fork it if you like it. I would appreciate a comment or email if you decide to use it.

The design is not by any means final, I already have lots of ideas for small improvements. If only I had the time to implement them all. Currently it is good enough that I can live with it. Feel free to share your thoughts about it in the comments.