Upstart Blogger minimalist WordPress themes work. Designed with simplicity in mind and styled in the classical minimalist tradition, they get the job done without any of the fuss and bother that more cluttered themes offer. And they are absolutely free.

These themes may be updated fairly frequently and you should always be using the most recent version for best results. To be notified of updates, subscribe to the Upstart Blogger feed.

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WordPress Themes

Upstart Blogger Futurosity Magazine
Named after Futurosity, my other blog for which this theme was originally designed, Futurosity Magazine is a magazine-style theme with a custom home page, ready for multiple authors. Usage does require some hand coding, but it shouldn’t be too difficult, even for noobs.

Upstart Blogger July07
This design, which was used on Upstart Blogger July and August of 2007, was never intended to be released publicly because there’s too much hard code in the template files. It is released without support. But even if you’re not interested in using it you might want to take a look to see how I’ve done some things (used MooTools, for example).

Upstart Blogger Takimata
Designed for the Sandbox Designs Competition and variously described as “original,” “creative,” and “a kind of anti blog.” hillaryjohnson wrote: “This is a favorite of the competition. It breaks all expectations of what a blog page should look like, without being confusing. That’s no small feat.”

Upstart Blogger Modicus
Available in two flavors: a fixed 3-column version, and a 2-column version with user-definable Options page that lets you easily configure Modicus to your taste. Change colors and fonts, arrange columns, adjust column sizes, all without hacking into the code.

Upstart Blogger Modio
Simple, clean, minimalist, spacious. Modio has a nifty CSS rollover side menu. One del.icio.us user described it as “uberminimalist.”

Upstart Blogger Minim
One of my most popular themes, Minim is simple, clean, and lightweight for speed. Minim has a sidebar that’s 1-column at the top and 2-columns underneath, with all columns ad-friendly.

Upstart Blogger Purus
The ugly duckling of my themes. Nothing fancy. Just a 2-column theme that was designed to be easy to read, with a muted background and large type.

Pligg Templates

Note: These templates are NOT compatible with the current version of Pligg. I’ve reluctantly decided to postpone any updates to these templates until the release of Pligg v1.0, if then.

The templates, which were hack jobs from the beginning, were becoming impossibly confused salads of code from Digital Nature and yget. Trying to update the templates while retaining the same formatting was an ordeal akin to balancing a checkbook that’s a penny off.

Since yget seems to be the only template included in the official releases of Pligg, it makes sense to build any future versions around the yget code, and the easiest way to do this is to start from scratch. That’s something I only want to do once, so I’m going to delay any updates until the Pligg code is stable.

Also, I’m discontinuing support for the Upstart Blogger Tutor Lite template. I thought it was a great idea, but there were very few downloads of this template compared to FuturePligg Solemnity and UpstartAqueous. Also, the Pligg developers may be working on something similar themselves.

I know that this news will come as a disappointment to some Pliggers. If someone else would like to take over these templates, I’m happy to let them go in the best interest of the Pligg community.

FuturePligg Solemnity
UpstartAqueous
Upstart Blogger Tutor Lite
Upstart Blogger One
Upstart Blogger Future First

Scripts

upstartblog_cron_backup_1.2_without_mutt
You can use this script to automatically backup your MySQL database. See 8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others).