andreasviklund.com

While playing around with a music project I am working on, I got the idea to try a few things one of the songs I made for Lagoona many years ago, a FastTracker-based song called "Parterial Enfino" (which it is just a made-up nonsense title that doesn't mean anything). I wanted to make the song a little longer and let it start and end with drums so that I could put it in a non-stop music mix. I fired up the music programs and started playing around, but it all went a bit further than I had planned… In the following couple of hours, I basically recorded a new version of the song!

When I was done, I realized that it was a long time since I had that kind of inspiration, and that I should celebrate that in some way. While this song is not really the style I plan to work with, I will let "Parterial Enfino (2008 edit)" represent my return to the world of music. I have uploaded the song as a demo to Swedish online music site Allears.se, and I would like to invite you all to check it out. Feel free to post a comment here, feedback is always appreciated. Don't judge me too hard from this song, it is just the first step in an adventure that will hopefully go far…

On my Allears.se artist page you'll also see the artist name I will use for the upcoming music project. It may be somewhat familiar to frequent visitors and friends, since it represents my creative work with newer templates and themes as well. I will adopt Daleri as my artist name, and the old testing site Daleri.com will soon be re-launched as a separate artist site while this site will continue to focus more on web design and my everyday life.

Edit: I have removed my music from Allears, it was definitely not the right place for my music. I have tried a whole lot of music sites over the last ten years, and it is always interesting to see that the ones that are owned or sponsored by big record labels are the ones that gives the worst member experience… Anyway, my music is now located on PureVolume.com - I hope it will work a bit better!

Today has been a completely hopeless day, full of problems and worries on several levels. Worries are usually the most effective way to kill my inspiration, and since most worries are related to the currently bad economical situation (caused by not being able to work for a long time because of health problems), losing my inspiration is a worst case scenario. I really want to spend my energy on doing good things, but that has been hard to do today.

With that in mind, it feels like an amazing irony to run the "What is your blog worth?" test today and find out that my blow is said to be worth more than 13,6 million dollars. Or according to another estimate 1,9 million dollars. Even the lowest value estimate that I could find feels like a bad joke.

On a day like this, it is tempting to sell my site and use the money on killing all worries, and then build something new from scratch. I know that it would take a lot of hard work and a long time to build a site that could match this site - if it would be possible at all. I also know that selling the site would hurt my reputation and my personal trademark a whole lot since I am so closely connected to this domain name. But any day ruined by worries make me feel that it could be worth taking a chance, since I could probably not do very much good with this site anyway until I can put all worries to rest and focus on my work…

The best possible scenario would of course to get rid of all the worries without selling the site, and that is my #1 priority right now. The plan is to launch a new company and run this site as a full-time job starting next year, as described earlier. But I will only be able to do that if I can afford it, and that possibility feels pretty distant on a day like this. Especially now that I will remove all text link ads from the site because of the "sponsored links" debate. That is why I will keep on writing about the possibility to advertise on this site - atleast until I have found advertisers that can keep the site running. It shouldn't be very hard, the interest has been huge during all the time this site has been online. But today, all advertisement slots are empty - and that just adds to the worries.

In this very moment I am open to all solutions, even selling the site if I would get the right offer from the right person or company. I hope that you all can have some patience with me while I'm standing on this balance line. I've been here before, and being an all-optimistic person I know that it usually turns to the better soon. Until then, don't get too mad if I post confused or emotional rants here, I'll clean those out in the forthcoming reboot as well. That's a promise.

While working on the new site design and the updated content structure, I have spent a lot of time going through my site statistics to learn more about the way this site is used. Out of all the tools I used for this part of the work, Google Analytics proved to be the most useful. Analytics has a "site overlay" feature that made it possible for me to browse my own page while the link popularity was visualized above each single link. Together with lists of navigation trails, landing pages, exit pages and time spent in the different areas of this site, I got enough information to learn how I should build the new site navigation - and which links I should highlight on the new frontpage.

For example, there is no use of having links to monthly blog archives in the sidebar since they are almost never clicked anyway. Instead, I could just highlight the link to the archive section where all the posts can be found anyway. The categories are not used very much either since most visitors click on the category links for the post that they are reading if they would want to read more posts from that category, but they are still useful to quickly find posts about specific topics - especially from non-blog pages.

I have started to make small changes now, so that I can see how it affects the usage of the site. For example, the montly archives are now removed. More changes will be made during the next couple of days, and you will probably see the new layout and content structure take form, piece by piece. Doing this detective work has actually been much more fun that I thought it could be. I've learned a lot from it, and much of it makes sense when I look at my own clicking habits on other websites. It will hopefully help me make this site a little better, but I will also apply the knowledge on my template design work to bring in some new ideas there. It may not make any major difference, but it is good for the inspiration…

The snowball is rolling, I'm back at work and feeling great. And I am actually getting things done which is a relief. Thanks for your patience and for all encouraging and friendly comments! It has been a great support…

Right now I am working on fixing a lot of things that are not really broken - just not very good. I'm working with template updates, site updates, layout re-structuring, advertisement management, music management, writing the FAQ… It is a whole lot of stuff to do, but I am actually moving forward now. I'm planning to make a major site reboot on January 1st, and then get back into doing good things again. If something on this site would not work or be missing or looking strange at some point, then it is probably only because I am turning the code upside-down as a part of this work.

There will be a few changes to the general site structure, some that I have written about before and some that are new ideas. For example, you will be able to download latest template release and the latest song directly from the frontpage - and then click into either the templates section or the music section where you will find more material - well categorized and organized unlike the mess I have today. The blog will be cleaned up and completely outdated information will either be updated, marked or removed. Categories will be refreshed, tags will be added and it will be easier to post comments on older posts.

On top of the wishlist: A site sponsor!

I will also add one or two new advertising options where a highlighted advertiser will finally be able to put a well-placed advertisement banner on all pages of this site. The interest from advertisers has been huge over the last year, and now that I will take the step into being a full-time template designer I will need the support of advertisers and sponsors in order to keep this site online and updated with new content in the future. With this post, I would like to ask anyone who may be interested in becoming a sponsor or advertising on this site to contact me - and do it as soon as possible since the interest will be high. And also, to be honest, since I would want to have everything set up before the holidays…

New wild number - new inspiration boost

Just for the fun of it, I went through the download statistics for my templates just to see what the numbers were. I found out that on OSWD.org, OWD, Open Designs and on my own free website templates page, I now have more than 1,5 million template downloads (wp-themes and modified blog/cms templates are not included). Now, I have stopped keeping track of all the wild numbers long ago, but the numbers are still a huge source of inspiration at times. I'm writing it here just to have the number documented…

And finally…

While I'm writing about the future, I would like to ask for some directions. I've started writing and recording music again, and I have noticed that the interest for older songs is getting higher. "Riders, Unite!" is getting attention from the Pump It Up PRO feature, and I may even be able to make one or two guest appearences at a eurodance party tour in southern Sweden soon. More about that later, I'll skip to the point for now.

I would want to make a music video for "Riders, Unite!" and possibly also for some other song. It doesn't need to be special, but it must be a bit better than the boring auto-generated photo slideshows that my limited skills would let me do. I have no video editing skills, but I do have some nice material from old musical adventures that could be used.If there is anyone out there who would be interested in giving me a push in the right direction (or maybe even help creating a video), then let me know! I would be happy to learn more, but I have no idea where to start and what tools to get. It is just a huge world of interesting possibilities - and knowing how long it took me to learn how to make music, I am almost ready to give up before I have even tried… Any help or tips would be great!

Many months ago, I was contacted about having a couple of my songs included in a new release of a popular arcade/console dance game, In The Groove 3. It sounded really interesting since it would be a way of getting my music out to new listeners, a promo opportunity that I didn't even knew existed.

I agreed without thinking very much about it. Months passed without any news, until I suddenly learned that the game project had been closed down. It was sad news, but appearently another project would be launched and the team wanted to include my music there instead. Once again, I agreed. But this time I didn't have any special expectations about it. In fact, after a while I almost forgot about it all since I didn't expect anything to happen.

But it sure did. A couple of months ago I got an e-mail asking me why I had not posted anything on my blog about having my music included in "the new Pump", and a quick Google search helped me find the name of the new game: Pump It Up PRO. After a quick read-up, I learned that three songs from my music collection were selected for the game - which was going through extensive live testing in arcade halls already. The songs are:

• Andreas Viklund - Riders, unite!
• Lagoona - Into my dream (Kaveh Azizi remix)
• Lagoona - Be my friend (2001 edit)

Right now, the music download links on both my own music page and the Lagoona page have been removed since I am re-organizing the music pages. Once the site update is complete and the new music pages are online I will update this post with download links to the songs. Until then you can go to my artist page on purevolume.com where you can download "Riders, unite!" and other songs by me, along with some of the most popular Lagoona songs. For free, of course (no registration required).

Getting into the world of videos

While learning more about Pump It Up PRO, I found a lot of dance step videos on different video sites, including several that include my music. For example, check out this clip showing "Riders, unite!" on the "Crazy" level, or this one that shows "Into my dream" being cleared on the 10-pad Nightmare level. I was happy to see that the songs often get nice feedback in the video comments, it was a happy surprise. I also discovered several artists that I had never heard of before when I looked at other Pump It Up PRO videos, so it is definitely a working platform for music promotion…

This is a new world for me so I don't know much about dance games yet. But I'm hoping to learn more about it through the music and through the people who dance to it. Just days ago, Lagoona classic "The promised land" appeared on the frontpage of StepMania.com as an entry in the StepMix 3 Contest - giving me even more good reasons to learn more about dance games, and even try the freeware game StepMania myself.

I will return to this topic in future posts for sure. This project is already giving me lots of inspiration for making new music, and with some luck it may perhaps also give me the inspiration to make that music video for "Riders, unite!" that I have wanted to do for years now. It would be a really fun project to do. If anyone out there would be interested in taking part of a music video project based, just let me know!