I absolutely love being old enough for everything that was once cool (and then embarrassing) to become retro cool again.

Back when the internet was born (but before you were) all the cool websites in the known universe were black. We only had 256 colours to work with then, mind, and 2/3rds of those are revolting. Plus a ton of people were not declaring background colours yet, so by default most people’s personal web pages appeared on white. Using black instead meant that things still had contrast and were readable, but sites looked more designed with black.

Black was it, baby.

Then we got more colors and black became antiquated and embarrassing. Blue was the new black for a while, and then green*, then orange, until a rather dismal gray period emerged. In response came the internet’s blorange phase, in which absolutely everything was blue and orange. That one lasted for a painful age, until the next generation of designers, screaming in agony, ran as far away from blorange as PhotoShop could take them. To white, in other words.

Now, predictably, black is the new black, which I find amusing because, of course, my first website was black and I have been waiting more than 10 years to be able to use the original non-color again without having my site pulled for public indecency.

My love for the striking WordPress theme by Yishi (on the left) is actually what inspired me to pick up a domain name and start blogging again. I loved the black. And the layout. The blue, on the other hand, gave me bad flashbacks to the Microsoft website circa 1996. Which will no doubt shortly become cool all over again.

Anyway, 12 hours later, here we are. Theme is a heavily edited Resurrection from the amazing Yichi. Also the social bookmark icons. Font is my all-time favourite, BlackJack via DaFont. Button set is from iStock. And black is my bitch.

*In theory, I wish I could show you a screen shot of Wired’s lime green website circa 1996, but not really.