Five Years 10 January 2010
Holy macaroni it’s the year twenty-ten already. Where’s my orbital-space-whatever-flying car — I’m gonna need it to beam myself up to my space villa on Mars. Or not. It still doesn’t feel we’re here already. I know 2010 is just a year after 2009 but, still..

2010 — Even Danbo couldn’t believe it.
Anyway, first post of 2010!
Five years and five days ago, like a boy who had discovered how awesome cotton candy can be (for the record though, cotton candy was never my thing), I stumbled upon WordPress — which was, at the time, a shiny new blogging engine still in its infancy. But that didn’t matter, for I deleted my HTML-hardcoded blog whose code I shamelessly copied and modified from some random blog — and never looked back.
My host then, Stafa, graciously installed my first copy of WordPress (version 1.2.1) via Fantastico — magically sprouting a Hello World entry telling me it’s my first post and that I could edit it and start blogging. My website just talked to me, I marveled.
Back then, WordPress’s default theme was bland, full-width’ed and a dull-green that shouted for a change. Then I found Kubrick. Yes — if Kubrick looks familiar to you, that’s because it is the very look you see every time you install a fresh copy of WordPress. From version 1.5 on, Kubrick became bundled along with WordPress as the default theme we all know now — in 2010, that might also shout at you - change me!
But five years ago, Kubrick was a game-changer.

One of my first mods of the Kubrick theme circa 2005
Rounded corners, appealing minimalism, subtle footer gradients, and with an easily customisable header image to boot, it wasn’t hard to see why Kubrick took the blogging world by storm then. Once I got Kubrick running on my shiny new WordPress installation, I started, with however limited knowledge I had of CSS, modifying it so that I had the most unique Kubrick theme on the net.
Fast-forward five years later, I’m on my own domain sporting a self-made theme I designed and coded from scratch — what you’re looking at right now. Thus it goes without saying that Kubrick was largely instrumental in sparking my personal endeavor in web-design. Even the tehCpeng.net version two theme I’m running now is based on the Kubrick framework — a last-minute design decision as I wanted the new theme to differ as much as possible from my previous works off the Hemingway framework.
Later on this year, WordPress will be retiring Kubrick as its default theme — the first time in five years. Needless to say, Kubrick is now relatively dated among a largely design-centric blogosphere it helped stir about in the first place. Tina Daunt of The Huffington Post has a great piece on how Kubrick, a single blog theme revolutionised the blog design arena. I couldn’t agree more on Kubrick’s contribution on changing the face of the blogosphere into one that not only focuses on content, but also on design and aesthetics.
Reaching my fifth year in blogging on WordPress, I can’t help but to look back on the humble beginnings. As Kubrick retires as the default theme for WordPress, it will most likely be forgotten among the new generation of WordPress users with access to sleek and shiny modern themes widely available today. But blog designers around the world would never forget Kubrick’s former glory and how we were once inspired by this humble theme to make the web a much more beautiful place as it is today.



