There. Just look at that! I’m actually crying a little, staring at my screen in awe. This is a dream come true and it is glorious. Actually, it is much more than I‘d ever hoped for. It is just like I wanted it to be. And it only took three years to realise it …

Once upon a time, in the autumn of 2012, I decided I wanted to be part of the amazing book blogger community. So I needed a blog. I first went to Blogger but quit before I really began. I always had a notion of what my blog should look like and blogger just didn’t let me adjust the theme like I wanted to. I thought about trying WordPress.com, but learned that I’d be constrained there, too. Well, apparently, I had to do it properly – and turned to self-hosting. My ambitions are always sky high. It’s my perfectionism that only let’s me strive for the very best, most expensive, and incredibly complicated.

After looking around, I even found a design I quite liked and started out to turn it into what I wanted. Naturally, that’s an awesome idea if one has next to no knowledge about CSS and HTML. Painstakingly, I adjusted the theme without knowing what I was doing. I learned a lot but by far not enough to turn it into my dream. After a couple of weeks I gave up. I wanted to start blogging, not spending all my time on something that would never happen. I wasn’t all too happy about the result, but I just decided to overlook all the things that bugged me. It was ok, it did work, so I had to make do with it.

The years passed and – as I just realised – more or less exactly a year ago, I finally went looking for help. Incoming Super-Crini, who apparently is good at everything. There’s really nothing she can’t do. Suddenly, my dream seemed within my reach. So why did it take a whole year to get it done? Well, because I just couldn’t decide on something. I tried a million different ideas, colours, forms, and versions of everything and anything and at last I pieced it all together in Gimp so that Crini knew exactly what the endgame was. I bet she put the whole thing together in a fraction of the time it took me to design it.

Over the last week, we puzzled the whole thing together. Poor Crini, I kept nagging her with requests of my perfectionist notion of how it should look like because I had no idea how to adjust it myself. However, I’m quite proud I managed to solve a couple of issues all on my own and learned a lot about CSS and HTML in the process. I wouldn’t have managed without Crini, though, who just worked her magic and made everything look so easy and so perfect. You should just see the backend of the new fancy review pages. I feel like a little child at Christmas playing around with the form. Totally and utterly in awe.

So here it is, my glorious, fabulous new theme. It’s not completely done, there are still the tabs and spoiler tags missing, but that might take a little while longer and since I mostly used them on older posts, they are not necessary for the site to work. They will come back and the posts will all look their neat selves again. Although I checked every single page, there might still be things that might look odd or won’t work. If you encounter something, just let me know so I can fix it.

And now the question of all questions: How do you like it?