With thanks to Rob for pointing me in the right direction, Shamus Writes is now sporting a modified, Web 2.0-ish look.  I contacted Ant Eksiler, who is giving away free custom WordPress themes to folks who meet a certain set of criteria, and he took my Bluesands theme and tweaked it to give it a slightly cleaner, more glossy look.  So, my thanks go to Ant for his hard work (and for sorting through my stylesheet) and putting the finishing touches on my theme.  I’ve also added credits for him in both the theme’s footer and stylesheet.

So, what do you think?

I finally finished up my bb-Bluesands theme for bbPress that complements my Bluesands theme for WordPress.  I’ve been working at this in fits and starts for the last several weeks and just put the finishing touches on it today.  If you want to see what it looks like live, step over the forum and check it out. 

I’ve got to say that my site’s stats from yesterday alone make my numbers from the rest of the month look paltry by comparison – nearly 1000 hits yesterday, mostly directed at my BlueSands WordPress theme.  The next closest day this month is around 140 hits.  Quite the margin of difference.  Of course, it helps that I also made sure to add BlueSands to the Weblog Tools Collection write-up for yesterday, which always sees a lot of traffic.

It’s also a little more than twice the number of hits my site received when I released the Navigation theme for bbPress, which isn’t all that surprising, considering that WordPress is still, at this moment, more popular than bbPress.

BlueSands for WordPress is finally ready for release.  It’s a 3-column, widget-ready theme with a fluid width main content area and is built on the famous Sandbox theme.  As a result, BlueSands has much of the powerful markup that Sandbox has become known for, including special classes for preformatted text, code, and definition lists. 

BlueSands also provides support for the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.  Once WordPress 2.3 with the UTW tag importer is released, I’ll update this theme to replace the UTW sections with the native WordPress tagging system.

BlueSands represents about 20-25 hours worth of work, about two-thirds of that simply troubleshooting a couple of unfamiliar Sandbox elements.  I’m very pleased with the final result, which receives a fair bit of inspiration from the Navigation theme, which I’ve always loved.  BlueSands uses the colors from the WordPress dashboard to create a clean, crisp look with a minimal design.

Since I also use and love bbPress, I’ll be making a version of BlueSands for bbPress soon, as well.  Once it’s ready, it will be available for download from the BlueSands page, along with the WordPress version, both individually and bundled together.

You can check out the full demo or download the theme from its home page.  Bug reports, problems, or questions about BlueSands should be directed to my support forum.

BlueSands is released under a GNU General Public License.

I’ve been working pretty steadily over the last several days to complete the theme that now adorns this blog.  At this point, I’d say it’s about 90% complete.  The 10% that remains involves a whole lot of tweaking and validating code before it’s ready for public release.  I’m pretty excited about it.  This is only my second WordPress theme, and it’s a far cry better than my first, if I do say so myself.  I’ve been wanting to build a custom theme for awhile now, but I hadn’t really had the time until I started having all this back trouble – and even then it’s only been since two weeks after my surgery that I’ve even felt up spending this much time working on the code.  As soon as I finish tweaking everything, I slap this sucker down on its own download page and post a formal release announcement. 

I’m also planning to redo my bbPress theme to match, thus giving the two primary parts of my site a more cohesive look and feel.  I suspect that one will also be a fair bit of work, though it will probably be much less work than creating my first bbPress theme, since I build this WordPress theme using the same colors with the end goal of creating the bbPress theme.  Once I’m done with that, I’ll update the download page so that folks can have their option to download the WordPress theme, the bbPress theme, or both themes bundled together.

Also, with WordPress 2.3 coming out at some point later this year, I’ll update this theme to accommodate for tags being native and Ultimate Tag Warrior going the way of the dodo.  That, however, should be a very easy tweak.