If you’re reading this, then I’m afraid to tell you that it has all gone off without a hitch and the great blog migration of 2026 has been completed successfully. We’re now live on a new host, in a new country, on a new continent, and with a fresh coat of paint to boot.
I’ve never been particularly fussy about my theme here. While I’ve definitely had preferences, and have never shied away from moving something around, or changing something here and there, I’ve never been particularly bothered about anything overall. Despite a number of theme changes over the years, Show Off by WooThemes has been a fine theme that I’ve been happy with for many years. But we’ve had Show Off for a long time now, and for a few years, I’ve had a few ideas about what my blog would look like, if it was something I had to design “from scratch”. But hold onto that thought, because we’ll come back to this.
Email receipts show I purchased Show Off from WooThemes in November 2013. How soon I implemented it after that is a mystery; a post from October says I updated some post visuals, but there’s no posts around that time that indicate I changed themes entirely, at least not in the same way that there were the previous times this happened. Which, surprisingly, turned out to be quite a few times in the first few years’ of this blog’s infancy. Let’s chalk the rapid change of theme to the rapid pace of change of the web at the time, my own changing preferences as I learned about what I wanted and what I didn’t, and probably a little too much time on my hands. How else would I have gone looking for WordPress themes? Where there’s lots of low-quality themes, outright scams where you might download some malware instead of a theme ZIP file, and all of that is before getting to designs I actually like? Anyway, for all I know I could have sat on Show Off for the better part of a year, and only made the switch around the time I changed from shared Australian hosting to a VPS in New York from Digital Ocean, where my blog has happily been served for over a decade now. But we’ll come back to this, too.
And while I’ve never really hated the current theme, I’ve never really loved it, either. It’s been firmly ensconced within “acceptably OK” territory all this time. Framework themes are a bit like that. They’re over-engineered to cater for a wide variety of layouts and tastes and styles and personal preferences, but at the same time, lack the kinds of personal flairs that make a personal blog, well, personal. I’ve never needed WooCommerce compatibility, nor a fraction of as many plugins as they offered at the time. I enjoyed the flexibility of being able to customise the theme to my liking, and based on screenshots of the original theme I did exactly that, but even then, that was a one-and-done thing to setup the look and feel until I had something that I was happy with, not something that I continually re-visited on an ongoing basis. And now that I’ve been there and done that, all that flexibility is just extra baggage. Useful and necessary, at the outset, but now just something you’ve been dragging around on your journey when you could have had something more sleek and lightweight.
And as the years have rolled by, and both cosmetic and technical baggage has accumulated, the time has come to swap themes yet again.
But to what? Another framework theme seems ill-advised, given what we’ve just covered. Besides, it’s 2026, are there even WordPress theme shops in this day and age? Surprisingly yes, and I even think Elegant Themes were selling Divi over a decade ago, but that still doesn’t make them a good option. I don’t care how many times “performance” is mentioned as a selling point, the fact that it’s mentioned in the first place is a dead giveaway that maybe the theme isn’t as performant as it could be. But like I said, that comes with the territory when it comes to all-in-one framework themes.
Clearly, the best option is to do what I’ve always wanted to do, and design my own theme from scratch. Paid themes might come with customisability advantages, but that’s only because they’re the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none option. If I design my own theme from scratch, and include the features and layout that I want, then isn’t that the better deal overall? Where I won’t need to spend a bunch of time customising the theme to my own liking, and can instead spend that time fixing other issues along the way?
But if I am going to design my own theme, I don’t want to design something only for the current flavour of the month to change. That means Liquid Glass is out, despite how technically impressive and cool it is. Or uncool, depending on what you think of the latest iOS and macOS releases. The Okta app’s recent rounded redesign is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid. I don’t think it looks bad, in fact it’s much more aligned to the overall design language of iOS 26 and 27, but what’s it going to look like in 5, 6, 7 or 8 years when design language changes again, and there are new paradigms to incorporate into our designs? I don’t think overly-textured, reality-mirroring skeuomorphic design was necessarily a net positive for design, but neither were the flat, lifeless landscapes that replaced it. Like all things, maybe the answer was a bit of both, which seems to be what we’re moving back towards. If I want to design my own theme, it has to have a textured background, a slightly raised reading surface, dark mode, and be responsive so it looks good no matter what device you’re reading on. It’s 2026, for crying out loud, and my current theme doesn’t even support dark mode. I know changing designs isn’t a big deal, but look at Instagram’s new font. It’s… wild. Maybe that’s 2026 for you.
For just about as long as I’ve had Show Off, I’ve been completely enamoured with the design of the Black Pixel blog. No, not the current monstrosity. The one from around 2012 (Internet Archive link), that had a beautifully textured background, an off-white, slightly-creamy reading surface, and such a wide column for content that there was a clear separation between content and navigation, as well as carrying the side benefit of being able to fit so much content in that bad boy. I think you can see from the Internet Archive link how good it looks, and I even said as much, back in the day, even going so far as to say I should spend a week building my own version (although obviously, this link now points to the current version, not the one I loved at the time).
Well, FOURTEEN years later, here we are. It’s 2026, and the making-stuff-up-machine (that’s a large language model, for the folks playing along at home/stuck under a rock since 2024) says we can make something up and do better.
We can add a paper-like texture. We can add a little underline animation when you hover over links. We can add dark mode, and a button that lets you choose your preferred mode, but will default to your current system preference. And because I have no idea what, if any, CMS that Black Pixel were using at the time or now, we can make it all work with WordPress.
But we can do better. We can build the core of the theme in about a week, then spend the next four weeks nailing down details. The link underlines. The arrow bounces. How it looks on mobile, how elements collapse and are rearranged. How images stand out from the page in both light and dark modes. And arguably the most important part, how it renders almost two decades of posts where my post style changed from being primarily a link-blog, to having multiple photos in almost every post, to embedding YouTube videos and Twitter posts, to the current longer-form posts, often with only a single photo.
I sweat the small stuff so much that I ended up spending about a week thinking about whether I wanted to use curly quotes: my previous body font did, but this one doesn’t. I decided I’m OK without curly quotes in body text even if it’s technically possible using the two fonts I have currently. Why? Well, smarter people than I designed the font in the first place. Whatever they used as a base for the font didn’t have curly quotes, nor did they add curly quotes after the fact, so who am I to question their far greater design acumen and reintroduce curly quotes? And yes, I very seriously looked at which alternative fonts had curly quotes. There were one or two alternatives which didn’t meet other criteria I wanted, so I decided to stick with curly-quote-less Inter.
Barring very minor details like curly quotes, where the juice wouldn’t necessarily be worth the squeeze, my own custom theme called Endgame now reflects my own personal preferences. Almost every aspect has been dictated by me, implemented by a large language model, and then iterated and refined based on the output, both as individual features, and as part of the theme as a whole. Almost every aspiration I’ve ever had for my own custom WordPress theme has been included, despite some not making the cut when measured against its surroundings. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s “plain” in some areas. But like all design, good design is as much as what you include as it is what you don’t, and I didn’t think it was worth messing with the core reading experience of a personal blog just to inject some personal touches, and I think the rest of the theme has plenty of those already. Even if my hopes and dreams for what I would include if I could, would have taken me an inordinate amount of time to be implemented by hand, they’re done and included now, thanks to the assistance of a large language model. It’s very close to perfect in my eyes, and I’ll happily run it for the next decade, no worries. Maybe with some small tweaks, here and there. Beyond that? Eh, no promises.
Because time is a flat circle, as I alluded to earlier, the blog’s VPS is now back in Australia. Or it might be because after 8 years I moved it to NYC, Digital Ocean now offers VPSes in a Sydney location. I always get those two confused. This has a couple of benefits, but most of them have to do with speed. I know the increasingly-fibre NBN was a thing back in 2013-2014, but back in 2014 when I migrated to a Digital Ocean VPS, my choices were between several different offshore data centres, with the closest being Singapore. I’m not really sure why I ended up choosing New York instead of the closest option, but everyone in Australia has paid that price for the past decade in round trip times, myself included.
I’ve thought about switching away from WordPress for speed reasons, back when static HTML files were the flavour of the month/a viable alternative, but decided against that for maintenance reasons; they just seem to have such a fragile build and deploy, it wasn’t something I wanted to think about. I publish so infrequently these days that the less friction there is to doing that, the better. WordPress has other maintenance costs, of course, but they’re infrequent enough and worth the editing and publishing experience that basically anyone can come back to after a year and be able to use without remembering what commands to run just to get a post up on the site.
Whatever the original justification was to hosting in NYC instead of Singapore was, that’s been felt by everyone not in NYC reading my decidedly-non-NYC blog. For a personal blog this was probably totally fine, but I certainly felt it every time I was remoted into the box and typing in the console had a quarter of a second of lag, despite being a mostly-fibre link between here and the server. By removing that lengthy distance, and by the fact that packets now only have to make a trip to Sydney and back, the site should feel faster. The lighter-weight theme might also help with that, but I’ve also optimised image and video sizes to help, with hopefully little if any discernible loss in quality. If I ever decide to host anything offshore again, someone just add 0.25s of latency to everything I do in the hopes that I’ll reconsider.
Oh, and I’ve also dropped the www in the domain, and we’re now just at https://bennylingbling.com. This was yet another one of those things that should probably have been done a long time ago, but I like to think I was holding onto the www for two reasons. One, because I was loathe to touch something that was working just fine, as we all sometimes are, of course. And two, I like to think it hailed to signify a different era of the internet, back when the internet was actually, you know, fun and whimsical. That’s getting harder and harder to find these days. This shouldn’t have broken anything, if I have any idea what I’m doing, but let me know if something doesn’t seem right to you.
So that’s Endgame, a new theme on a new host that hopefully will work great for the next decade. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s named after the Marvel film. My favourite, as well as being both the culmination of an epic saga, as well as the start of something far greater.
Well, that’s the aspiration, anyway. The only question is how many posts I’ll publish during that time.