I’ve switched themes to Tarski, not because I was having any theme problems, but because I felt like a change of scenery round here, and I thought that this photo from my recent week at the beach would make a good custom header background. I cropped it, and added text to it, with Picnik. The font in header is Ariel, which while not ideal was the most suitable of the fonts available in the basic version of Picnik.
Reasons for choosing Tarski (from among the thousands of themes available for WordPress these days) include: it’s clean; it’s well documented; it’s kept up to date, and indeed the version I’m using was released a couple of days ago for compatibility with WordPress 2.6; it has all the features I was looking for, such as widgets; it’s available at WordPress.com, so if I get to like it enough I could switch my main blog to it.
There are a few ways in which I think that Tarski could be even better. For example, I don’t like the way it displays tags separate from other post metadata. I’m not sure that I like the navbar, but I don’t see a way to disable it; on the other hand, maybe it’s such a basic feature of the theme that if you don’t like it, you should find another theme, or be willing to do your own Tarski-hacking. Oh yes, and there was some widget-related weirdness when I switched to Tarski. But I’m glad that I did switch.