Its been long enough. I’ve had this idea to put together my WordPress theme in a way that I could easily share it with others. I receive dozens of requests every year from readers telling me how they appreciate the simplicity and reader-focused nature of my site and how they’d love to use the theme, or at least a variation of it on their own site. I’ve been using WordPress for the past 8 years and in that time my site has always had a modified version of someone else’s theme. I always found it easier to start with a theme created by someone else and simply modifying it until I had it the way I wanted. The problem with this approach is that I end up with a theme that is a mashup of various things–old code from the original theme and new code that I added to override the original. When someone asked for my theme, I was always embarrassed to give it to them and I knew that when I did give it to them, it probably wouldn’t work the way they wanted, as many things were hard-coded specifically to my liking. I’m finally changing all that. A few years ago I created a mailing list called “Independent Publisher” and put up a page on my website where I could point people to signup of they were interested in hearing more about the system I use on my site (WordPress theme + plugins) and now I’m finally making use of that list and this idea. There were 18 people on the Independent Publisher interest list and I’ve added a few more since putting the IndependentPublisher.me site together and announcing it on Twitter. I’ll be writing updates here as I work on the theme and get this project moving. If you don’t want to receive daily updates, you can change the email frequency to Weekly or Monthly through the Subscriber Options link in your email. If there’s something in particular you would like to see in this theme, or if there’s something missing for Independent Publishers on the web, please let me know. I’m committed to being an independent publisher for the rest of my life and I want to use open-source and free tools like WordPress to make the publishing process simple and extensible while giving readers the best, most beautiful experience possible.