andreasviklund.com

Within the next couple of days, I'm upgrading my hosting plan. You may see some downtime, but if so, it is planned and for a good purpose. I will be back with news once the upgrade is complete - and I think that atleast a few of you will like the story. See you soon!

Updated a few hours later: Ok, that didn't take as long as I had expected. The upgrade has been made already, andreasviklund.com is now running on a dedicated server from SiteGround! It is a major upgrade in terms of features and performance, which at the same time reduces my hosting costs with $20 per month. I am typically wary about making changes to my hosting, but this was a fairly easy decision to make. And thanks to the great support team at SiteGround, the switch has been completely pain-free.

The upgrade is perfectly in line with my ideas, plans and priorities for 2009. I am planning to bring this site to life again, now that we (Johanna and I) have got a good start with our company and it looks like our idea will actually work very well. While I have not written anything special for a long time, I am actually planning to start blogging again. Both about templates, CSS and other topics that may be interesting to the typical visitor of this site - and less interesting everyday posts about my life in general, and the many adventures and challenges that makes life worth living.

I already know that most people will find a personal blog boring. But it will be fun to write, because I love writing, especially documenting my life and sharing my experiences with others. And I have stories to tell, if there is someone out there who care to read it all. But I'm writing mostly for myself, atleast to start with. I have learned a lot from reading my old diaries. Besides, it is a good way to practice my English, while at the same time giving you a face and a story behind all the HTML and CSS code. And this is a personal website after all!

But don't worry, I will also post tutorials, how-to:s, tips, bonus materials, site reviews, software reviews, photos (which will be released as an own image bank of stock photos, free for everyone to use just like my templates) and music. And I'll listen to requests, feedback and ideas. If you would want to see something special, then let me know. For example, I've been asked to show the post comments under each post, not have them hidden as I have now. I will definitely change that back soon.

I have not set any official launch date for this restart. I tend to miss those kinds of dates, and I have several times lost track and inspiration when not being ready by my own deadline. So I'm not setting any date. I'll just start right away, without making it complicated or dramatic. Now that I have the hosting upgrade done, the next step is cleaning out old and outdated posts and re-structuring the site content. Basically, most of my old blog will disappear. A fresh start can be worth a lot, but it will happen gradually to make sure I don't lose the inspiration this time. An upgrade to WordPress v2.7 is also planned, as well as upgrading my themes…

Good plan or lousy plan? Think I'll manage to make this happen? Feel free to share your opinions and feedback!

…one and one still is one…

A line from one of my all-time favorite songs. Coming soon to an editor near you.

After another long time of total silence, I've finally got started with cleaning up the site and removing outdated content. Which is basically all the content except for the website templates. Most blog posts will be deleted in a day or two to give room for something new. Perhaps a new attempt at blogging, perhaps just regular posts about templates and themes. I have a number of them piled up for release since a long time, but you have all heard that before so I'll spare you the promises this time. I also hope that I'll get the WordPress themes page sorted out in a similar way as the templates page, because the themes page is still terrible…

Speaking of themes, I have just found out through this post that WP-Andreas01 has reached 25.000 downloads on the official WordPress themes directory, making it the 2nd most downloaded WordPress theme on the site after the Tarski theme. With thousands of bloggers using the theme live today, it is a shame that I don't have any other info about it than the short presentation on the themes page. The template pages update turned out to work really well, so I'll do something similar for the themes.

Another detail is the music pages. I haven't hosted any music on this site in a while, except for the TSEC album "Dreams". The Lagoona collection and all my own songs from way back in time, has been online on an external server but the files have not been linked from here. The plan was to move the songs to a regular music site, but I never found the inspiration to get it done. Instead, I gathered the best of my own material into two albums and published it through a torrent linked from The PirateBay. I'm planning to organize the albums in some better way as well to keep the old tracks alive for those of you who enjoy the old tunes, but when it comes to music today I would rather look forward into the project I have joined this year, the Leeloo Project. I will write more about that during the winter, although probably on the official band site (once it is launched) instead of here.

This site will remain my own hiding place, my "online home" as I once defined it. And I will probably put most of the work into free website templates, with two toes placed in the WordPress community through my theme design. Again, this is easy to write. I don't know how well it will work out in reality, but I know one thing for sure: I will not leave any old stuff floating around. And I will not get any more logo design offers because of the 3 year old logo design request that is just collecting digital dust in the archives…

"This is Andreas, and as far as you know, this will be attempt number seventyfour…"

With the opening of the new official WordPress theme directory on WordPress.org, you will see a number of changes on my WordPress themes page. I will have as many of my themes hosted on the theme site as possible, and I am now uploading the themes as they are updated. Two themes have been approved so far, WP-Andreas01 (updated to v2.0) and the new Daleri Sweet. 1024px is awaiting its review and approval and will probably be added in a few days.

You can see live previews of the themes, grade them and find many other good themes on the site, and it is well worth a visit even though the number of themes is low so far. All themes are reviewed in detail before approval to ensure that they meet the requirements for being hosted on WordPress.org. All my approved themes are listed on my userpage, and you can also subscribe to the andreas tag to stay updated on new releases and updates.

Edited: For Swedish readers: WordPress-teman på Svenska