• Picture of myself/logo, prominent at top.  Make use of “Header Image” feature.  The only theme I found making use of this is Inanis.
• Honor fonts as specified.  Don’t override everything and make my monospace look like everything else.
• Don’t override or ignore my favicon.
• Big, prominent RSS icon to encourage subscription.
• Ability to display categories/pages on some sort of toolbar.
• Hide comments section if comments are disabled for the page/post.
• Tagline near the title.
• Whitespace is nice, but don’t overdo it with zealous line spacing.
• I don’t need three different locations for ads.  How about no ads?
• No superfluous pseudo-widgets. If I didn’t add a widget, please don’t do it for me.
• No custom boxes. They’re a nuisance.  Just make use of the standard widgets.
• Make your preview picture look at least a little bit like the real thing.
• jQuery is nice for improving the UI/UX.

Of the hundreds (thousands?) of themes I looked at, ~50 of them looked worth trying out.  Of those 50, these are the best free themes I found that came close to satisfying my list:

• Inanis
• Fresh Editorial
• Leafo
• Prosumer
• Simple Balance
• d’sanctuary
• Transparency

If you’re a mere theme shopper, I hope this helps you spend less time than I did searching for a sane theme.  Have fun tweaking!

If you’re a theme designer (or will be soon), please consider the list, and add any major omissions and personal pet peeves in a comment.

Over the years I’ve gotten a lot of value out of reading Amazon reviews. But only recently have I actually become a contributor to their sophisticated social system (a different S3 .

Now I’m discovering some great benefits to writing reviews — let me share them with you. Here are the reasons it might be worthwhile to be writing reviews of practically everything you read:

• Accredit yourself as a reader/writer/analyst/critic. Put your thoughts where people can see them.
• Easily maintain a nicely enumerated list of personally recommended books. Amazon does the work for you.
• Your reviews have an RSS feed that others can subscribe to.
• That means you now have another blog, and you can gain some typical blogging benefits by simply creating more quality reviews.
• Another badge/chiclet for your blog. You can cross-link your reviews and blog. Bloggers already like to sport the “Amazon Wishlist” widget, but an “Amazon Reviews” version (not yet created) is even better.
• Your Amazon profile may have high page-rank for your name. It’s the top result for my name!
• Auto-post your reviews as tweets. Incorporate the feed with twitterfeed.
• Point your friends to your reviews and they’ll be led to your interests and activity. Persuade them to read what you read.
• Your reviews make good links. Just like you commonly link to your existing blog posts, you can also link to your reviews (instead of the books directly). E.g., I’ve adopted Django.
• Your review stream is personal. Forget the fact that the book you’re reviewing already has 200 reviews; most don’t. People will still see yours regardless.
• People with similar interests will arrive at your content frequently — c’mon, it’s Amazon!
• Authors might end up sending your their books for free, if your reviews are top-notch.
• Immortalize the reading experience by spending a meager 30 minutes recording your thoughts. You already spent 20 hours reading it.
• Remember what you read. You’ll go through the book a second time to create the review and this will ingrain it in your memory.
• Be encouraged to read more. Maybe set a goal to write a review every week (and thus read more).
• Be inclined to highlight key points to ease review. Those will also be valuable years later when you revisit a book.
• Improve writing ability. Practice makes perfect.
• Think differently about what you’re reading when you know you’ll be writing about it. Get practice at summarizing and reading at high and low levels.
• Reviews don’t have to be long. Amazon even recommends brevity. It’s usually pointless to write just a couple sentences as a record that you read a book, though sometimes it works.

If you want to know what I’m reading (and maybe some other things about me), you can subscribe to my Amazon review feed, or just follow me on Twitter. I hope to be growing my review list rapidly.

Don’t forget to be clicking “yes” for all the reviews you find helpful!

Resources:

• How To Read A Book
• A nice article on How to Write a Book Review

In a future post I’ll discuss what it takes to become a top reviewer (despite my present rank of 893,844), or “vine voice”, what are the benefits, and whether it’s worth pursuing.

Blogger doesn’t appear to allow me to attach anything here, so I’m including a link to my manually generated, hacked up OPML file that contains the 15 SWPDX attendee bloggers. You should be able to just import this swpdx.xml file into your reader. Enjoy these Portlander blogs!