I toyed with the idea of using Drupal for this blog, but then I came to my senses. At this point I’ve developed over a dozen not just blogs, but WordPress blogs, plus my host, Dreamhost, makes the inevitable periodic upgrades a cinch. It’s just point and click.

Choosing a theme, however, was less obvious. In the end, after a bit of window-shopping at sites like Smashing Magazine, I went with adapting the very handsome CopyBlogger theme. It wasn’t so much the looks (though I do like the clean lines) as the way it renders the code. It has a good reputation for semantic markup and search engine optimization. See, for example, this review.

I’m still not quite satisfied with my adaptation, but it’s getting there. And it was very easy to do. My only suggestion for others wanting to use it would be to delete the separate call for “custom.css” (line 12 of header.php) and just edit the style.css. It’s there to protect the layout cross-browser, but it you’re used to CSS, you won’t need this, and deleting this second stylesheet saves both confusion and at least a little bit of bandwidth.