andreasviklund.com

After a couple of crazy days of fighting in "the pirate war" in Sweden (that's what the newspapers call it anyway, I would call it "the filesharing debate") I'm leaving Jokkmokk to spend a day with my father in Porjus. I have a couple of big projects coming up very soon, including the big re-launch of Jokkmokk.biz which will be something really special, but before I get started I'll take a day off to get some extra focus and motivation. I'll be back online again on Thursday.

I published my first online photo album in 1997. Back then, a lot of manual editing was needed to keep the gallery running. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it since it was incredibly fun to get feedback and comments for the photos and images! Since then, I've had a few different kinds of photo albums online. But all of them have been maintained manually. And now that I want to launch a new gallery for photos and images, I am looking for a good image gallery script.

I have tried many gallery scripts but never found anyone I felt was right for me. All the big scripts (Gallery2, Coppermine, Singapore and so on) have had too many features - and they have often been very hard to customize. And the smaller scripts (Minigal, Simple PHP Gallery, Lazy Gallery and so on) have just not worked as I wanted my gallery to work. But now I am trying ZenPhoto which seems to be pretty much what I want. It is small, light, based on PHP/MySQL and it gives a lot of options for the design and layout. It should be perfectly possible to build into my website, and there are even plugins that connects the gallery with WordPress. But the technical part is not very interesting right now. What I have in mind is the purpose of the gallery. Why do I want to add a gallery? What would it add to this site? Would it be useful for anyone?

I am not any photographer, but I take a lot of photos with my little digital camera. I have taken more than 8.000 images over the last couple of years. It would be fun to make a small part of these images available to others, because I am pretty sure that there are people who could use them in some way. So one of the features that the gallery would provide would be free stock photos. Not of professional quality, but still usable and of course in full resolution. I also have a lot of digital art that I have created over the last 10 years. Manipulated photos, graphics design, wallpapers, 3d renders, resource material, design patterns and other things that has been archived for years. With an image gallery, I could make a section for free desktop wallpapers and printable art as well. It could be usable for template designers that need background images as well. A third feature would be documentation. A realtime biography in images. Good for friends, family and anyone interested in my adventures. Looking back a few years, I could post concert and event photos from the time of TSEC and Lagoona, because I have a lot of that…

And finally, a gallery would give me a chance to show you something that I think everybody should see: The incredible beauty of the area where I live! It is everywhere… I can't explain it in words, because it just doesn't work. How can I possibly describe the feeling I get when I sit by the riverside a late evening in June, listening to the water hitting the stones on the beach - under the intensive light of the midnight sun? Or the excitement I feel when I look up at the dark sky a late december night, and see the arctic light dancing right above my head? Photos doesn't give it complete justice, but a single picture still says more than a thousand words.

But as always, it takes time for me to get it done. Writing this post is a try to force myself to speed things up a bit! Comments, suggestions and feedback is of course very welcome, as always. I will once again need a couple of betatesters for the gallery once I start uploading images to it. Currently, I have only added a few old wallpapers just to test the basic functionality. But it seems to work well. Next step is to customize the design. I won't post the url to the gallery here, because it is not a supported feature and the images are not free to download and use just yet. So if you find the gallery on my site (it is quite easy), please use it with care for now!

Photos:

1. Suorva, with the magnificent waterfalls - and the Sourva dam in the background.
2. Ice crystals on the grass and on the trees, on a cold winter day in Porjus.
3. Harsprångsfallet, once a major waterfall but now dried up because of the dam.
4. Midnight sun over the Lule River in Porjus.
5. The Akkats dam - with art by Bengt Lindström, Lars Pirak and Lars J:son Nutti.

I'm proud to announce that andreas00 v1.0 is now officially released! Get it from the templates page! It is not available at any other place yet, but I will send it to OSWD.org and OWD next week. andreas00 has already been ported into themes and templates for nine different blogs and content management systems! Some ports are not ready yet, but will be available in a few days. Check for yourself:

Current ports of andreas00 for…

• - WordPress - by myself (coming next week!)
• - MODx - by Mark Kaplan
• - Etomite - by Dean Steventon
• - Serendipity - by Carl Galloway
• - Website Baker - by Peter Mathyssen
• - sNews - by Aaron Morse
• - Drupal - by Aaron Morse
• - Textpattern - by Michael K. Pate
• - Movable Type - by Michael K. Pate

You can also see this list inside the template, on the "Enhance it!" page. Thanks to everyone who has ported it, you are great!

By the way, the last template I released (1024px) is now online on both OSWD and OWD, and it is doing much better than I expected. I thought that such a simple template would not help too many people, but it has got nice comments. If you look at my themes page, you can see that the first ports have arrived for it already.

In a few minutes, I'm going away over the weekend to spend a few days in the forests around Nautijaur. I will not be online during these days, so if there is anything seriously wrong with the template I can't fix it until Tuesday. I will post photos when I come back, and make the needed update and re-organization of the themes list. I couldn't manage to finish wp-andreas00 in time, but I will do it in the beginning of next week, I promise.

Over the next couple of months, I will write a simple weather report each week for Swedish national newspaper Aftonbladet, who are following the arrival of the spring at eight different places in Sweden. The reports will include a photo from Jokkmokk or the surrounding area, the current temperature, the amount of snow and any signs or sightings related to the spring. The first report were published today, both in the newspaper and on Aftonbladet.se.

I have a feeling that I will be the last of the eight reporters to report that the spring is finally here. After all, Jokkmokk is the place where you can have a snowy midsummer day!

I have got several e-mails with questions about the jacket I was wearing during the market. It didn't fit me very well as it was too small, and I don't like to wear fur. However, the jacket (which J:son called "The bear dance") is truly a piece of art and it was really cool feeling to wear it. Here is a photo of me wearing it just outside the main market area. It only shows the front, and the main artwork is on the back. But it should give you a little idea of what the jacket looks like!

More photos and the promised report will be added later. I've got the inspiration back, so it is only a matter of gathering all the photos and write up the text.

And if that red folder is familiar to anyone, I'm happy to say that I'll write a post about it too very soon. Yes, it is the Virtuas logotype.