Well, that was hard work; but I’m quite pleased with the result. The apparent simplicity hides some rather complex stuff going on underneath. I can’t imagine any non-geek being able to customise their blog but perhaps they use a simpler but less flexible system. Even I’m glad that PHP is a pretty obvious programming language—not a huge step from sh or perl. The tricky bit is the CSS—it is still very much a black art to me.
I have just commented out the unwanted stuff from the default template for the moment but once I am happy with it I will cut out the redundant stuff which should speed it up a bit.