In the end I went with writing a child theme for Twenty Ten. I have such a difficult time finding a theme I like, and then find myself hacking it for hours on end because the code sucks. Writing my own theme would have taken years, well maybe not, but would have taken far too long.

So here is my new WordPress child theme, titled “Mr. Jones”, inspired by the WordPress 3.0 Admin Bar and the grey color scheme.

For anyone who has been to this site before you have by no doubt noticed that the look and feel of the site has changed dramatically. After benchmarking page load times on my site and seeing average load times of 11.6 seconds I decided that the way to go was a minimalist look. This new theme has been modified…and yes I will distribute the modified version.

It took me a while to find this theme, Aielman’s SEO Theme, by Uberdose and it was just what this site needed. While it was almost perfect, I needed to have links for my pages which didn’t come with this theme and I needed to make the blogroll look like the page links I had created. There were also some strange formatting issues, no doubt from some of my other modifications, that have been resolved as well.

Average page load times now are around 1.5 seconds.

Download

For the Categories Cloud you see on my Home page see my No Widget Category Cloud WordPress Plugin.

Change Log
0.2

• Initial Public Release

0.2.1

• Added additional CSS for Internet Explorer to fix formatting issues

0.2.2

• Removed show_description from wp_list_bookmarks function in index.php