Kind of off-topic, but somehow I've found that blogs that use that particular template (with the blue top header and all) pretty much always have content that I find interesting or useful. Often they contain niche information that's hard to come by elsewhere. Has anybody felt similarly/know what might cause this?
It’s a rare moment on HN when a commonly maligned CMS written in a commonly maligned language gets such high praise for its default behavior. Just commenting here in hopes I can come back and reflect on the weird disconnect between UX and nerd preference.
I believe it is a WordPress default template. Perhaps it is because these authors are so focused on quality writing they have no time for frivolous nonsense like 'templates'.
It was the default Wordpress theme from ca. 2005-2010 which at least in my mind was basically the peak era of "the blogosphere" especially on technical topics.
As others have said it's a default wordpress theme, so often used by people who install wordpress in its default configuration because they want a reasonable https GUI to type content into a blog, but don't care about making it pretty or special looking (As you would if you were to use wordpress to build a company webpage).
EDIT: Trying to remember examples of it; here's one I can recall: http://www.nynaeve.net/?p=180