First, I have to thank Bi'an Linchuang again for sharing the OneBlog theme template.
It has been less than half a year since my last theme change. During that time, I watched OneBlog go through more than ten updates, big and small. As the feature set kept growing, I realized something: there were parts of the template I absolutely loved, but there were also quite a few things I simply never used. On top of that, I had already made many rounds of small and medium custom edits, so the theme had long stopped looking like its original version. With updates arriving so often, I had to keep reapplying my own modifications every time I followed a new release. Eventually, I got tired of doing that.
That was when the idea came up: why not build my own theme? If I need a feature, I can add it myself. If I hit a wall, I can ask ChatGPT. If one AI is not enough, then ask both GPT and DeepSeek.
So I started digging around everywhere: the official Typecho forum, other bloggers' sites, the blogrolls of blogrolls, and all kinds of themes people were using. I also pulled out some old themes I had used and customized years ago from ancient USB drives and cloud storage. Then I sat down and seriously thought about what kind of theme I actually wanted. I even shamelessly asked Shangjixin for a copy of the theme he uses himself so I could study it.
After more than a week of work, I had made 13 different versions of varying sizes, and none of them felt right. At one point I seriously thought about giving up. Someone who only knows how to tweak a bit of CSS really had no business trying to stir things up like this.
You thought this was about to turn into a motivational speech? Absolutely not. I paid for the AI coding tools, and if I did not finish this thing, how could I possibly justify the money I spent?
So I opened VSCode again. For debugging, I used a local Typecho install through phpstudy, editing while constantly hitting ctrl+F5 to check the styling. Messy code did not matter at that stage; as long as it worked, that was enough. AI could help clean it up later and make everything nice and tidy.
After two more full days and one all-nighter, I finally finished the theme and put it online on the 9th. Of course, a first self-made theme does not come out of nowhere. You can definitely see traces of many other themes in it. But one thing I can say for sure is that this is not a theme built with CTRL-C + CTRL-V.
I also want to thank Bi'an Linchuang, Shangjixin, and Ninan again, because in the beginning I borrowed heavily from the design ideas in the themes they made or used: OneBlog, JiCore, and Coral. They are all excellent developers.
The new theme will probably have plenty of bugs in its early stage, big and small. ~~I originally added pjax, but it caused all kinds of weird bugs, so I decided to remove it~~ pjax has now been added back in. If anyone runs into problems, feel free to leave a message. I would really appreciate it.
Most themes online now are very flashy. That is not meant as criticism; at least for me, "flashy" is not a negative word here. They are packed with features and aim to be as visually impressive as possible. But like I said before, my blog is mainly a place for writing things down, and I do not really need that many dazzling or elaborate features. What I want from this theme is for the text itself to stand out, not for attention to be pulled away by other decorative elements, even if the content is nothing more than day-to-day rambling.
One thing that used to bother me was comment emojis. Many earlier themes came with lots of emoji packs, and every time I changed themes, old posts would be left with ugly shortcode remnants. For a while I even considered removing the emoji feature entirely. But then I remembered that the emoji setup in the previous theme was actually pretty clean and simple, so I transplanted it into this one. The main reason was that the code was so clean, and the comments were clear enough that even a beginner like me could understand them. If only everyone's code came with comments like that.
In the end, I decided to name the theme SM — the capital initials of the site. I just hope it feels pleasant to read on. ♥