I know, I know, everyone and their dog already has a blog. Duh. But with the new year coming up, who knows - you might want a fresh start, a side project or a new design to kick off 2008. Here are some of my favourite blog resources, naturally geared towards WordPress, and of course totally free because as we all know, I am cheap.

Weblog Tools Collection gathers newly released, good-looking themes from the wild that you won’t always find in WordPress’s own theme gallery. Some of them are just eh, but these are my favourites:

• Structure is an extremely professional, multi-purpose theme that really exposes the CMS power of WordPress. It is an excellent starting point for a newspaper website as well. If I had a WordPress Theme of the Year award to hand out, Structure would win it.
• Something more traditional, but nice and very easy to edit for a personal blog or small business: FantastycVector (with bonus horrifyc spelling.)
• My Diary is piles of fun for a personal blog, assuming you have PhotoShop and can edit the header graphic.
• For faux-hipsters, Deep Blue is a nice clear layout that totally drank the Kool Aid on the Web 2.0 colour pallet so will probably work perfectly with your achingly hip new logo.

For finishing touches, you’re quite likely to want to personalise your blog or add to the theme in some way.

• Dreamstime has almost 3,000 authentic, free images. They are also searchable, and include both photos and illustrations, though you have to dig a little harder for the illustrations.
• A set of totally rockin’, completely free blog icons for things like RSS, trackbacks, etc that can also be munged for general web design.
• Many, many sets of icons on which the provenance is a little hazy, so they should be used for non-commercial sites only. Also brushes and illustrations with the same caveat.
• And finally, StatCounter, the web’s best free stats counter that isn’t Google Analytics. It can also be turned invisible, free of charge, so the oh-so-ubiquitous SiteMeter can go take a leap. This has much better reporting, anyway.

So go forth and make with the pretty blogs.