As it was a nice learning experiment to create this theme, I’ll describe my process so it will be easier for others to create their own themes.

The Preparations

First of all, to be able to create a not totally awful theme you should have a clear idea about the design message you would like to broadcast. In my case this was “feeling free”, “simplicity” and “personal”. Still, it shouldn’t chase away someone who is interested in my professional background.

After I new what is the abstract message. I went on to look to many templates I like. For this you can find thousands of template galleries on the web. In this step I’ve decided that I would like a big opening image that serve like a first page.

I know that this is not very useful if you are extremely efficient as your users have to scroll down to get some message. So I’ve decided to have it only on the opening page. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work yet perfectly as byteflow uses generic views, so every call to the Blog/Post model uses big headers. Still, if you read the site from the RSS feed, then as you arrive at a specific post’s page, you will see a nice small header only.

Third, I’ve tried all the builtin themes that came with byteflow. Actually, this wasn’t something very useful, but at least I knew that I should build an the default template.

Crafting

Fourth, I started to build my own theme. I save the css and html of one of my pages, and started hacking it “offline”.

Hacking

Once I was done with the design I’ve started to work on the extra content I’ve imagined. I wanted the following:

• a taglist and blogroll in the sidebar on the homepage,
• many boxes of text/image in the sidebar on the homepage (like presenting myself)
• integrate google-analytics and django-monetize
• for a given entry the most recent post for its tags in the sidebar

As you might have already noticed some items are still not present. Hopefully I’ll add them one day.