andreasviklund.com

Today I'm leaving Jokkmokk for a day in the small town of Lansjärv. I will join my father Kjell and my grandmother Kerstin for an afternoon of car bingo. Yes, really! It has become a summer tradition for me, and I think that this will be the fifth summer in a row that I visit Lansjärv for a game of bingo. Lansjärv is not a big place, even smaller than my home town Porjus. But during the bingo days, it is completely crowded with a great mix of people, both young and old, locals and tourists. I have never won any jackpot, and that doesn't really matter anyway. The best thing with it all is spending time with my grandmother, the bingo trips are always very happy days.

Here is a small panorama photo of the last Lansjärv car bingo of 2004, showing only a part of the completely full football field that serves as a parking lot. Can anyone spot my father and the grandmothers famous VW Jetta?

Inspired by the silly traditions of the Swedish midsummer celebrations, I decided to make a collage of the best photos from the mini-vacation in Umeå last week. I still haven't added any real photo album to this site, so I figured that a collage would be a nice way to show the promised photos. And besides, allowing oneself to be a bit childish and just play around with photos and graphics for the fun of it is usually a good thing – it can give a lot of inspiration and boost the creativity. I was really happy about the way the collage was turning out. I had added 14 images, of which 4 were mixed into one layered photo showing me playing bowling. It sure looked a bit silly, but the collage was still a lot of fun to create!

But I was so into the puzzling that I forgot about saving a copy of the collage file, and when I was going to export the final image my image editor crashed – and an hour of image editing resulted in… Nothing at all! Losing work in that way is of course not a good way to boost the creativity. I couldn't find any motivation to start over and do it all again, so for now I'll only post this photo, straight from my own photo album.

The picture (taken by Micke on June 14th) shows me and Johanna inside a parking house in central Umeå. I haven't posted very much personal material on this blog in the past, but on July 2nd the two of us have been a couple for 7 amazing years – and that is something I would want to share with the entire world!

I will write more about that later for sure, but now I'm leaving the computer for a while to enjoy the great summer weather for a while. Later tonight I'll start planning for the addition of a photo gallery feature. Any good suggestions on what plugin/script/service to try out?

It has no significance at all in reality. Nobody cares about it. It is undeserved and means nothing. I know it all, as I'm the person who said it first. But I still can't help being a little bit proud since this is something that not many people will get a chance to experience:

At the time I write this, my site is ranked #1 on Technorati.com! Technorati is monitoring more than 86 million blogs worldwide, and out of all those millions they are currently listing my blog as the one with the most "authority". Insane, undeserved – but still a bit fun! Here is a screenshot, click on it to go to the my page on Technorati…

I am sure that I will not keep the sweet numbers for any extended period of time since the majority of the links that are making up my "authority" come from sites that are using my templates and themes instead of being content links that really matters. While it shows that my work is widely popular (andreas01 is probably one of the most used website templates in the world), it doesn't mean that I deserve any "authority" in the world of blogs…

But I would still, just for the fun of it, like to take this unique chance to write a few magic words that I never thought I would be able to express again after Lagoona reached the #1 spot of the MP3.com music charts (the largest internet music chart in the world at the time) back in September 2000:

I'm on top of the world!

(And with those lovely words, I return to the reality where my desk needs to be cleaned, dinner needs to be cooked and the dogs need to be walked. Once that is done, I'm going to spend a few more hours answering e-mails from a few of all the template and theme users that I can thank for getting a chance to write this post…)

Akismet, my comment spam plugin, has worked hard the last couple of weeks. Lots of seemingly correct comments have been filtered out as spam. But I have also got a lot of completely useless comments that has passed through Akismet just to be deleted manually by me. Comments is incredibly important for me and also for many of you. The feedback I get from your comments is a huge help in my work, and often also a great source of inspiration. But there are also people who abuse the comment feature in different ways, and that takes away much of the value in the comments. It is time to do something about that now.

I read all comments and care for all feedback I get. But for various reasons which I will explain below, not all comments will be approved and published on this site. I reserve the right to choose which comments to publish and which to not publish, and also to edit comments if needed. This is not as harsh as it sounds, as I have even approved comments that appear to be obvious cases of comment abuse just to make sure that all opinions get through. I have been mostly friendly and accepted this for a long time, but in order to improve the quality of my site I will now apply a couple of guidelines to the comments.

Most of you will not notice the difference, but those of you who will be affected by it should of course know what I will not accept – and why.

Please keep this in mind before posting a comment:

• Feedback is always welcome, no matter what the topic is. But public comments should be relevant to the post topic and of interest to other visitors, so if your message is all about something else then please send an e-mail rather than posting a comment.
• The language of this blog is English, so please write your comments in English. Bad or machine-translated english is still better than Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French or Italian. Comments in Swedish (my native language) are OK, but since only a small part of the visitors of this site understands Swedish I reserve the right to translate the comment before I approve it.
• Please write your name in the "Name:" field of the comment form. Site names or keywords that matches your site content have been accepted until today, but since more and more comments appear to be posted just to get free keyword links to various sites I need to change this. If the comment is perfectly OK (written in english, on topic and in some way interesting to other visitors) but the comment author name is replaced by a keyword or site name, I will simply delete the URL from the comment. If this would become a larger problem, I would need to move the URL away from the comment author name – and I'd prefer to not do that. Names followed by site names, such as "Andreas / Tjuvlyssnat.se" or "Luka of Solucija.com") are still OK in most cases.
• Stick to your information. It is very common to see several valid comments with different names with different website addresses – but still coming from the same person. This obviously looks like abuse, even if the actual comment appears to be perfectly OK. Comments that are posted in this way will not be published on the site. If the abuse is very obvious, all the involved comments (and other comments from the same person) will be marked as spam through Akismet.
• The openness will remain. Visitors who get one comment approved will get their future comments approved automatically. I will stick to that arrangement as long as possible, and it will only work if you all use the feature in a good way. I trust that all of you who visit this site on regular basis want to keep it this way, right?

I will wait for some feedback on this list and then add it to a separate page so that it will be easy to find for new site visitors in the future. Feel free to let me know what you think, and please tell me if there is something I have got wrong or something more I should add.

And finally a related question: I have got many requests to add a discussion forum here, but would it be worth the effort? There are several good forums out there where you can discuss web design and website templates, but the request I have got has been to have a place for free discussions and to get support for my templates and themes. In short: A place where users of my templates could help each other – and get free help directly from me. I have no own opinion about this yet, but I would be happy to hear about yours. I can not possibly answer all questions I get over e-mail, so it is definitely worth asking all of you what you think.

Inspired by Vidde's post about free music links, I made another visit to internet music legend (and my fellow tracker colleague) Perrra's music site. What I found there was too good to not post here…

Check the site and download "Everybody is born to love that House", "Hand in hand (original house mix)" and "Believe (Original mix 2006)". Like all music on his site, the songs are completely free to download. And they are absolutely amazing!

There are a lot of great songs on his site, especially if the Swedish humor songs and the parodies of another former tracker (now a popstar), Basshunter. There is also an old remix of my Esperanto release "La danco de la vento" worth checking out. Perrra has new projects coming up, it will be a pleasure to see what waits around the corner!