andreasviklund.com

Swedish news site DN.se runs a story about my website templates and the way that the template popularity has affected my website. You can find the article here. Feel free to post a comment if you have any question(s) or just general feedback!

Like many others, I have have signed up on Facebook some time ago and discovered that it is a great place to keep in touch with friends and colleagues. My Facebook profile is completely public, all Facebook members can see everything that I have posted. At the moment, you will find some photos that are not available on this site, including a public Lagoona photo album and a few pictures from my personal collection.

But Facebook is not in any way supposed to take away any focus from my own website or from my work. I'm hoping to use it as a communication platform rather than as anything else. I do not want Facebook to end up being all about work, but at the same time I am of course open for all ideas and suggestions that others may have. The first suggestion I got was really good: In order to keep my work separated from my personal life, I was asked to set up a Facebook group called "Andreas' website templates" and direct template users and designer colleagues there. And so I did!

I don't know if anyone will actually want to join it, but if you happen to be a Facebook member and want to discuss the designs, exchange ideas, get comments on your site, get help or ask me about anything, then you are very welcome to join the group! As always, I can not help everyone who may need help. I will still spend more time on answering e-mails than hanging out on Facebook. But if the group gets a number of members, perhaps designers could help each other as well…

I'll give this some time to see how it works, and I will write more about the response and how it all turns out in a few weeks or so.

Tjuvlyssnat is there too!

Tjuvlyssnat.se is also launching a Facebook group of its own. The group was created earlier today, but it has already got more than 750 members - including the entire site crew (Damon, Jennie, Marie, Petter and me).

And finally…

With that said, I have a request. I really appreciate all the friend requests that have been sent to me from template users all over the world during the last couple of days. But unless we actually know each other since before, please join the group rather than adding me as a friend. Or at least write a message and let me know who you are… Thanks!

I read a news article on CNN.com today about the "most widely read blogger in the world", Chinese Xu Jinglei. The article (originally from Reuters) has of course got a lot of attention all over the world, since it is really controversial to point out someone as the #1 blogger in the world. As always, it depends on what measurements that are used and in this case the blog has had "100 million pageviews in 600 days", which really says nothing about the actual number of actual readers. But it is still a lot, that is for sure, and it was not only the amount of visitors that caught my interest. It was her Technorati rank.

From the article: "Leading blog search engine Technorati has said Xu's blog recorded last year the most incoming links of any on the Internet, according to the online edition of the China Daily". I remember the surprise when Technorati made the changes that suddenly placed a Chinese blog on the #1 spot. I was myself listed on the popular blogs list at that time (around #40). But since then the girl has lost the top position, and some other guy has taken over her position as the most linked blog in the world. I bet that you have seen his blog some time, don't you think? Not that incoming links (or "Authority" as Technorati calls it) is a better number for measurements, it is even worse than "pageviews"…

During the same 600 days, my blog has had 15 million pageviews. I would say it is a good number, but it is far from any top level. But according to the measurement used to point out the "most widely read blog in the world", that blog should has had only 8 times more pageviews my site. Once again, that doesn't say anything about the actual number of visitors, and it is also not real numbers. But it says enough to make be doubt that the Chinese blog is really the most read blog in the world.

I am pretty sure that any person who knows his or her way around blog statistics and visitor measurements should be able to prove this article to be incorrect - or atleast force media to use real numbers and confirmed external statistics as the source material when such a claim is made. I do hope that I am wrong, but I can't see how "100 million pageviews" over 600 days could even be close to enough to be the most widely read blog in the world. If you do some math, the average number of pageviews will be 166.666 per day. Translate that to actual unique visitors, and it can be anywhere from 8.000-80.000 actual visitors in an average day. Is that really enough to earn such a pretty title? Seriously?

Every now and then, people ask me if I do a lot of speeches and presentations about my work. The answer is no, I don't. Every now and then I get requests and invitations, but I don't like to speak in public so I have never seen it as any serious option. Besides, I live in northern Sweden and most conferences and events take place in other parts of the world, so it would be a major project just to get to an event.

But today I am making an exception, as I will be hosting a small workshop about creativity behind the computer screen together with illustrator and artist Lukas Thelin, also from Jokkmokk. The workshop will be held in neighbour town Vuollerim as a part of the annual culture week. The doors open in two hours, and I haven't prepared anything at all. I'm bringing my experience, stories from the 10 exciting years that I have been using computers to create various forms of material (music, poetry, digital art, website templates and more) and some related material such as my CD collection (including a few copies of "Dreams"!), the Tjuvlyssnat.se book and my laptop. How these things will be used is all up to the visitors.

I have no plan for the day, other than doing my best to inspire others to use their computers to create whatever form of art they are interested in. And not to forget, to encourage them to share their work with the rest of the world as it can give a lot of inspiration in return. This will be exciting!

Edit: Now I'm back home again. The three hours passed very quickly, and even though there were only a few visitors it was enough to get into wild discussions about everything from building CMS:s to formatting and positioning TLA links using CSS. Not to mention game coding, logotype designs, YouTube videos, security in homemade PHP template sets, sNews and other things. I wouldn't call it a success since the arrangers expected much more visitors, but it was definitely a nice afternoon for me personally!

Edit 2: Viddes writes about the workshop…

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…)