Recently Drew wrote up the backstory to how this all happened and it is a fantastic read.

Two things: First, I love that Tumblr is doing things to monetize their platform for both themselves and their design-savvy community. Any service that you love should, at some point, begin to monetize. If they don’t, they won’t survive. These types of moves by Tumblr are moves that will ensure their longevity as a service. Second, I think some of the free themes could easily be pulled into the Premium themes category and the designers of which could make a few dollars on them (since this model wasn’t available when they originally designed their free Tumblr themes). I wonder if Tumblr reached out to some of them?

/via Evan Williams on Twitter.

THiCK is the very first premium WordPress theme that I’ve actually considered pulling my wallet out for. Not only is the structure of the theme refreshing but the number of options that it comes with out of the box should fit the needs of many a blogger.

You can preview the theme on Woothemes and Matt Brett has written a little bit about the experience he had developing it on his blog. He says this about THiCK:

“THiCK is a beast of a theme! It’s catered towards personal blog authors and packs a pile of features right out of the box, thanks to a number of a custom widgets created by the team at WooThemes. From a design standpoint, it’s extremely flexible. There are 2 main styles (clean and grunge) and a main colour scheme for each (light and dark). From there, you can choose from 5 variant colour schemes that change headings and links through-out the blog. There’s also 2 different header layouts that can be selected from the admin. THiCK is built on the 960 Grid System and the original PSDs are included in the bundle, so customizing further should be a breeze.”

If you are looking around for a theme, take a look at THiCK.

Source: THICK – A PREMIUM THEME FOR WORDPRESS.

These changes are really, really small.  Unless you come to this site on a daily basis (you do, don’t you?) you may not notice any of them.  A pixel here, a color adjustment there, an array sorting issue here, a speed improvement there. But these changes were mounting up.  Even browsing my site myself, looking for old entries, I became annoyed with some of the existing bugs because I knew I had already fixed them on my local install.

So today, while I’m running out to spend the weekend in The Finger Lakes region of New York for a wine festival, I published these “little things” to the live site.  I wish there was a way I could calculate the changes (perhaps I should be using Subversion or something), but my guess would be somewhere in the hundreds.  I still have some things that I’d love to get around to adjusting, but they’ll have to wait for the next update.

So, if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and poke around.