So, there I am, doing my normal surfing thing … and I stumble across another blog, whose theme strangly mimics mine!

Neil Lee’s BeatnikPad!

Let’s catalogue the similarities with my (now obviously) old theme (some of them somewhat eerie):

1. Dark banner across the top — check!
2. Serif-type font in the headline — check!
3. Serif-type font everywhere! (hey, apparently I’m not the only one who likes Georgia) — check!
4. Sidebar on the right — check!
5. Asian dude — check!
6. 30 years old — check!
7. Lives in Toronto — check!

… and here’s the sad part (for me) …
Started his website 3 months ago — BEEP! (errr … no)
– actually, Neil hit it up, like 3 *years* ago.

… which, sadly, makes *me* the Johnny-come-lately.

(and of course, the differences start piling up after that — lives with cats, works with macs, likes taking snaps photos, uses typepad, has own ISSN and so on … )

Well, props to you Neil Lee … I tip my hat to your design good sir.
It doth kicketh ass. :)

Anyway, it certainly kicked *my* ass into changing a few things around, as I was thinking of changing around my own-rolled wordpress theme anyway.

Old DJI Theme; New DJI Theme (well, you’re looking at it, right?)

I guess its funny that way — you spend a lot of elbow grease and otherwise frustatingly long hours to hone, grind, and polish your theme, and whoops! Turns out that someone already had that idea.
I wonder how many other theme authors run into this problem, by accident (not on purpose).

Or, how many different design combinations there *really* are, plus or minus the unconscious influence of other websites we may have seen around the web.