I thought I lost the screenshot of my old Scrapbook wordpress theme. To my own surprise, however, I made a  backup of my old blog before I deleted it. So, I uploaded that theme and tried it on wordpresss live preview. Ta-da! Of course, there are broken things like the far too big of an image below because this theme was crafted in 2008, and back then responsive design was not even thought of.

Then, I made a small modifications to the theme to add another sidebar widget and removed the image post thumbnail.

And, that was probably the last wordpress theme I ever made. In 2008. UN-BELIEVABLE.

Now, it’s 2013 and welcome to the era of responsive webdesign, flat design, and  user experience. Here’s to this yummy Minty wordpress theme! Yeay! Oh, I’m so proud of myself *flips hair* hahaha. So, this theme is based on vintage style, in a more simplified way. I don’t want it to look ‘heavy’. I guess the current Flat Design trend has it’s influence on this one.

Click image to enlarge. Now I have a full screenshot so that if I ever make a new theme in the future, I can always look back at what I’ve done! Wee! 😀

Thanks to Twitter’s Bootstrap, this theme  supports all media. Laptops, tablets and even phones! Here’s a screenshot of how it looks like on iPad. There’s probably a lil’ bug in the footer on iPad, but I don’t bother to fix it. HAHA.

Click to image enlarge

It took me 4 days to get the major design and coding done. Probably another day to debug and install plugins. And some time to tweak some minor details here and there. It felt really slow because I had to relearn some of the wordpress stuff. The wordpress templates had changed, and I believe it’s so much better now in terms of dynamic and control. Good thing I took web design commissions early this year so I didn’t waste as much time figuring things out from scratch for this one.

My favourite is the single post pages. Especially the comments section. I don’t know why I love designing comments section so much. There is something about customizing how each comment appears and the comment form. I guess that’s how much I appreciate comments *hint*.

I even styled the images with rounded corners to make it more consistent with the vintage style. The reason why I took screenshot instead is if I ever change theme in the future, this will not be lost. Screenshot from Krabi Trip part 2.

Some quick info & resources about this theme:

1. Designed header in Photoshop and moved to Fireworks for layout design
2. Built based on Flatstrap, a flat version of Bootstrap
3. The ‘Go to Top’ button  tutorial can be found here.

List of Plugins:

1. Related Posts plugin (at the end of each single post).
2. Facebook like, and twitter share plugin by Sharethis
3. Most commented posts widgets by Laurens Tan Hem
4. Better WordPress Recent comments (at footer) by Khang Minh
5. Instagram feeds plugin by ThemeBeans
6. Twitter feeds plugin by ThemeBeans
7. Archives page, Smart Archives
8. Site stats, Contact form, by Jetpack
9. Comment Reply Notification by Denishua

Hope you find the information above somewhat helpful. I spent significant amount of time to find the right plugin, so these are the best wordpress plugins I found and the *must-haves* for all wordpress-powered blogs now, in my opionion.

I don’t know about you, but there is something about creating your own theme that makes me feel more ownership towards my own blog. I guess that’s why I didn’t really have the energy to blog as much when I wasn’t using my own theme. HAHA *EXCUSES*

Speaking of blogging, it’s kinda sad that a lot of my blogger friends are no longer blogging. I linked the ones who still are on this sidebar. Let me know in the comments below if you’d like me to visit your blog and I might link you up! Also, let me know if you have any thoughts on this theme. 🙂