andreasviklund.com

As planned, the new year started with a whole lot of webdesign work! But instead of updating my own site according to the original plan, I have spent my time on working on other projects and designs. I was hit by an attack of template design inspiration which you will see the result of soon, and I have also assisted Johanna with a couple of projects that she has been working with. The result is three new launches that are well worth a look!

JokkmokksBHK.se

The first is the website for the local dog club: Jokkmokks BHK. It was built from a modified version of the 1024px theme for WordPress, translated into Swedish. Johanna is the new webmaster of the site and she has made most of the work herself except for the template editing.

Kennel-Anthems.com

The same can be said about the second site, her all-new dog site Kennel Anthems. It is a static website built with the andreas04 template as the starting point. The site is pretty faithful to the original design, but a lot of work has been made to add the content in a pretty way and make sure to keep a good site structure. I got really proud of Johanna's work when I ran a XHTML/CSS validation check on the final site and realized that the only thing that did not validate was a line in the statistics script that I had added. So much for my webstandards skills…

Elven.nu

But most interesting of all is Johanna's own blog, Elven.nu which has got a completely new theme. It is a variation of the design I've made for my own site (which should have been online by now). We may possibly release a public version of the theme, but I will make sure to get my own version online first to make sure it works as it should. Check it out, and feel free to let me know what you think of it. It is not advanced in any way, just a bit traditional in terms of the large image-based design. It looks very similar to my 1999-2000 designs, back in the days when nested tables and browser-specific code was considered cool…

Anyway, the silence here is definitely not a sign of a bad start of the year. The year has started in an amazing way, with very promising news about music production as well. I'll write more about it in the next couple of days for sure.

This weekend I've been in Porjus to enjoy "Porjusdagarna" (The Porjus days), a big annual summer event in the small town that has been a tradition for more than 20 years of my life now. It was a great weekend in a lot of ways, and in order to show you a little bit of what it looked like I have prepared an image with a few of the photos that I brought back home. I have placed numbers by each image, and the image captions can be found below the image.

1. Festplatsen, Porjus (the stage area).
The weather was bad, but the event still gathered hundreds of people over the two days.

2. Johanna and me.
Check out the newest family member, little Theo, in Johanna's jacket! Theo is the third papillon around, and he lives with my father in Porjus. Most of the time. Every now and then he'll visit us in Jokkmokk where he can go wild with our two girls Elven and River (Theo is River's brother, by the way).

3. Markus Fagervall live on stage.
Swedish Idol 2006 winner (and former WP-Andreas01 theme user) Markus was the artist of the day. I had not seen him live since Snabelfestivalen 2004, back in the days when he was still an unknown local rocker. I liked the music of his old band Liquid Scarlet back then, but the more radio-friendly style he plays today sounded great as well. And extremely professional of course. I didn't get any chance to talk to the star himself, I was busy with something else after the gig…

4. Daniel Viklund lifting the 170 kilogram atlas stone!
…which was the final part of the Laponia Strongman competition, where my older cousin Daniel Viklund managed to beat the competition (including Finlands strongest man!) to win the Laponia Strongman 2007 title! Daniels brother Emil can also be seen on the image. Daniel will compete in the Swedish championship (Sveriges Starkaste Man) in Arvidsjaur soon, aiming at a top-3 placement after finishing 4th last year.

5. Dad and Ida.
My father Kjell was of course proud of Daniels achievement, since dad has been lifting weights for more than 30 years and acted as a big source of inspiration for Daniel when he started working out many years ago. Younger cousin Ida was also around, and she drove us back to Jokkmokk on sunday afternoon when the event was over. Thanks for the ride!

6. Jingle Bass, Jingle Bass…
And finally, an image that I'm posting just for the fun of it. I spent most of Saturday night watching Live Earth on TV, but I also made a quick visit to a nearby party where I met some old friends and colleagues. But the interesting thing with this image is the lovely t-shirt that I have ordered from Perrra.se. I won't spell out the artist name that is written on it, but you can see it and listen to the music on Perrra's site! Perrra is one of my true idols, and the shirt have truly caught the attention of a lot of people this weekend. Thanks for the fun, Perrra, and keep the great work up!

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…

For the next 7 days, I will be writing "veckans blogg" ("blog of the week"), a guest blog on the website of the local newspaper Norrbottens-Kuriren. Those of you who can read Swedish and who are curious about my everyday work may should check it out! I haven't written any Swedish blog in a long time, so I will probably post several entries there every day during this week. Especially since I'm re-building this site and going through the massive reboot week that I mentioned in the last post…

Feel free to ask for specific topics if you are curious about anything special related to my work and my life.

The annual winter market here in Jokkmokk is now open. It means that this small town grows into a big meeting place for tens of thousands of people for a few days. The market, which has 402 years of official history, is the largest event in the local area and always a fantastic experience. In the last couple of years I have been involved in the event in different ways, performing live music on the different dance events and hosting art exhibitions from my music studio (which was located in the middle of the market area). But since I have moved out of the studio, I have avoided taking on any work for this market. I will be there as a regular visitor for the first time in five years, and I'm really looking forward to that!

Until I get a chance to post some photos, feel free to take a look at these images from the local newspaper. The texts are in Swedish, but you can still see browse through images. All of this happens right outside my window. A longer report will be posted tomorrow!