Emptiness Header Images

First of all, my apology to Tony Lauria for making him wait for a long time and for not being able to upload these images earlier as promised. Life has been exceptionally busy, but I’ll save the details for another blog post.

It was a pleasant surprise for me to find out that Tony and some other Emptiness Theme users like to the header images from previous versions of the theme and requested their availability for download. Thanks so much for using the theme.

So here they are (in chronological order)…

Light greenish-yellowish leaves on tree branches in front of my home in Carnegie. This picture was used as the default header image from v0.1 to v0.9 of the theme.

A city-loop train with Crown complex in the background. This picture was taken from the Flinders St studio apartment where I lived back in 2005. I used the picture as a custom header image demonstration on a cleaner way to customise WordPress Theme styles using MyCSS Plugin.

Stones and water, which I thought represent the theme of emptiness really really well. The picture was taken at Korakuen Garden during my trip to Japan this year, and was used in v1.0 .

Weird grassy plants at Shinjuku Garden. In retrospective, I found the random pattern of the plants to be quite interesting. This picture was used in v1.1 .

Buildings behind the Shibuya Crossing at night (original 1024×768 image). I used this picture to test the custom image header cropping feature introduced in v1.1 .

100+ Custom Emptiness

Five months since v0.1 was released, Emptiness Theme has been downloaded 5,867 times and given 4/5 stars average rating. Not bad. Even though it’s not as popular as other themes with fancy graphic design, I think Emptiness has its own target audience with it’s simplistic style.

I’m particularly happy to find (via Google search) more than 100 blogs using Emptiness Theme with customised header image and some with customised css. Check them out on my Picasa Web album.

I used Nautilus Image Converter to resize all images via a simple select all, right click, and resize. If only it also has an auto image quality compression then it would be perfect.

Emptiness Theme v0.1

Introducing Emptiness Theme v0.1 .

Since I started using WordPress few months ago, I’ve tried various minimalist themes available from WordPress Theme Viewer, but none of them really suits me. So, just like any designer-wannabe, I rolled out my own minimalist theme. It’s available for download, though I’m still trying to register it on WordPress Theme Viewer. I don’t know what’s wrong with Theme Viewer, they must be really busy with backlogs of registrations to process, or they’re totally ignoring the current Theme Viewer and currently building a better system.

Creating a WordPress theme was actually quite pleasant. PHP might not be the most elegant thing out there, but it does the job. I must give a standing ovation to WordPress Codex, it is one of the bests if not the best open source documentation.

There are some of my Blojsom themes that never saw the light of day, I’ll port them to WordPress later. Have theme? Will port!