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I would have posted a big entry with reports and photos from the last two days of the Jokkmokk winter market, but that post has been delayed since much of the happiness with the market was killed today. The reason: Disrespectful people and their bad behaivour.

After the grande finale yesterday night, the big and beautiful fireworks that declared that the market was over for this time, a lot of people from different places met in my studio to have a drink and get to know eachother. There were artists, a few musicians and some actors who had done various performances during the event. And it was really fun, I met a lot of nice people. I even had an inspiring discussion with Mikael Niemi (a great Swedish writer whose books I really love) who was one of the people who visited the studio yesterday night.

But I left the place early since I was extremely tired. I had only slept a few hours the night before, and since my father were living in the studio during the market, I left the responsibility for the people and the studio to him. He was my guest, invited to the studio since he is a really great guy and a big help to me when there are a lot of people around me during the days. Once I left, he took over my position as the host. It worked very well, and when most people left the place after a few hours, everything calmed down.

However, there were a few people left that were going to sleep in the studio that night, including two women who could not find any place to live during their visit to Jokkmokk. Since they knew my other guest, J:son, I let them sleep in the studio on the condition that they would stay calm and not disturb me or anyone of my guests at any time of the day. It worked well, my first impression of them was very positive. But once the other people left the studio, the women started acting very disrespectful. They verbally attacked both J:son and my father, screaming out insults and hateful opinions of a kind that noone would have accepted. But as the kind and friendly person that my father is, he didn't ask them to leave. Instead, he apologized for being the person he is, which made them go on with even worse insults (of which some were extremely offensive) - for several hours!

Unfortunally, I did not find out about this when it happened. My father called me during the night and told me that there were people acting bad in the studio, but that it was OK with him and that I should not worry about it. If he would have told me what really happened, I would have got back to the studio and asked the women to leave since they broke both the two conditions that I had given them. But my father know me very well, so he didn't tell me anything. Even in that situation, he was nice to these women…

Since the women were drunk, I could have accepted the whole thing as an alcohol-related mistake if they would have apologized and expressed regrets about their behaviour today. Alcohol can really bring out the worst sides of someones personality, and I believe that was what happened here. But they didn't apologize. And when my father walked 4 kilometers in -30c degrees cold to get them a car battery charger so they could start their car and travel home, they didn't even thank him for his help…

Now they have left, so my father and J:son will hopefully get a good nights sleep for this night - which is the last night they are staying in the studio. I do expect the women to contact both J:son and my father and apologize for their behaviour, and if they care at all about their own reputation they should also contact me. In any case, they will of course never be welcome back.

I am a friendly guy, and I don't get angry very often. But when someone acts disrespectful to a person that is close to me, I get mad. And whenever that happens, it feels really good to write about it. It helps me get the anger out of the head. I have written many entries like this, that have never been posted. And when I started writing this entry, I wasn't sure if I would post it either. Now I have decided to do it. But I may very well delete this post tomorrow when I have calmed down…

The big market post will be published tomorrow instead, if I can keep the inspiration and ideas for it alive until then!

Today is the final day of the market, and I am just about to leave my home to spend the whole day out on the market area. When I come home, I will post photos and news from the whole week, and maybe tell a few fun stories as well. The highlight of the day is the nice weather and the temperature, which is currently -24 degrees celcius where I live. A typical Jokkmokk winter market saturday, in other words!

Interesting Jokkmokk links:

Realtime webcam from Jokkmokk - This camera is mounted on the building where my studio (which is currently an art gallery) is located, and the image shows you a small part of the market area. And if you watch this webcam all day long, you WILL see me waving to the camera today! I will appear on it atleast two times, but i won't tell you when. If anyone happen to see me (I will be wearing a gray jacket, a pink hat and black gloves), take a screenshot and e-mail it to inbox@ this domain. Everyone who has found the right person will win some kind of secret prize!

Temperatures in Jokkmokk - Measured at one of the schools, about 400 meters away from the market area.

I have got a lot of friendly and encouraging comments after the article yesterday (see my previous post about it). And whenever I have talked about web design, code quality and details like accessibility and validation, people have really paid attention to my words. I'm not really used to that…

And with the new day comes a new article link! This time, the newspaper writes about the art exhibition in my studio, (note: Swedish text) and the amazing paintings by the well-known sami artist Lars J:son Nutti. Once again, I'll translate the article and post a photo of the paper version as soon as I can.

So how was the first day of the three-day main Jokkmokk winter market event? The historic market, which is a roleplay-like market that brings the salesmen and visitors hundreds of years back in time, is now over. The opening ceremony on lake Talvatis yesterday night was nice, but not as crowded as the 400-year anniversary opening ceremony last year. But I'm still surprised, since there were a lot more visitors today than I expected - both in the studio and in general. The first day is usually quite calm since most people who visit the market come on the two last days (friday and saturday). And since last year was a strongly advertised anniversary, many people (including me) are expecting less visitors this year. But there were a lot of people in Jokkmokk today, so friday and saturday can be very exciting. Saturday around mid-day and on the early afternoon is usually the worst time to walk through the area because of the big crowds, so I will mostly be out early in the mornings and later in the afternoon.

By the way, J:son sent me out on the streets to show one of his artworks, an old jacket with an oil color painting of a woman dancing with a bear. The reactions were very interesting, people were shouting comments about the painting and taking photos of me as I walked by them. It was a strange feeling, but I'm not surprised since this jacket is one of the true highlights of the market this year. I wish I could afford buying it for myself, but it is a piece of art and priced at the same level as J:son's regular paintings, so I'll just have to be happy with the attention I got from wearing it today… I also posed for a couple of photos from my own camera while wearing the jacket - and the images look really cool! I forgot the camera in the studio/gallery so I can't upload any images tonight, but I will some photos in a new entry tomorrow.

During the Jokkmokk winter market in 2005, I invited people to my music studio in the middle of the market area, to record improvised music. I didn't expect it to lead to any recording, I just hoped to meet a few artists and make some new contacts.

But by a co-incidence, three people with very different background visited me at the same time, and we ended up recording an improvised one-minute song together just for the fun of it! The result didn't sound like anything I had ever done before… We managed to mix several types of traditional music with electronic sounds from a synthesizer and a drum machine - and it was a really fun thing to do!

The basic melody was made with a native americal double flute, which was played by Andreas Kornevall. The sound of the flute is amazing, I had never heard anything like it before. I added a dark background pad with a synthesizer just to see how the sounds would work together. Henrik Öberg recorded a simple drum beat, and it created a magic feeling to the recording. And when Jan-Ivar Rimpi added vocals in a traditional sami jojk fashion, the song was complete!

Unfortunally, the jojk recording was lost. The only copy of the song with the vocals is the live performance version of the song that was filmed by a television team from the Deutsche Welle who was there to make an interview with me. But one version that survived. Write me an e-mail if you want it and I'll send it to you!

The first weekend in February is coming up soon, and it is once again time for the great winter market in Jokkmokk. The market which has been arranged almost every year for more than 400 years, is the biggest event of its kind in northern Sweden. At the great 400-year anniversary last year, more than 80.000 people visited Jokkmokk during the market. That is incredibly much, since Jokkmokks is a really small town (population: 3.500)…

Just like last year, I will be a part of it all. My music studio (anyone remember Baygroove Productions?) is located in the same building as the tourist information - which is the central point of the market area. Last year, I kept the doors to the studio open, so anyone who were curious about music production were welcome to visit me and play with the synths and machines. It turned out to be a success, the studio was crowded during the entire market. But I recently decided to close the studio, take a break from music production and put more energy on web design and other projects, so for this year things will be a bit different!

I have invited Lars Json Nutti, a well-known local artist who make absolutely amazing paintings, to show his work in the studio. We spent all afternoon today converting the electronic music production studio into an art gallery! Showing art will be a new experience, and I really look forward to opening the doors on Thursday…

And like last year, I will be blogging from the market so that people who live in other parts of the world can follow our adventures in Jokkmokk during the week. I will of course use the "jokkmokk" category for this, so anyone interested in live reports can subscribe to the RSS feed (see the archive for feed url). I will do it like I did last year, with photos, videos and texts during all times of the day. This means that there will of market-related posts during this week, but once the market is over I will be back with the regular subjects again.

I did the same thing last year. The market blog from 2005 was visited by thousands of people each day of the market, and a lot of people came to my studio only to write a blog post of their own or to send greetings to family and friends in other parts of the world. I got hundreds of e-mails during the market week, so I know that it was appreciated. But from the e-mail feedback I learned something else too, and that was that people did not like the official market website.

Since the official site has always been really bad, I reported this success to the arrangers and suggested them to run a blog of their own on the official market website for the 2006 market. I told them that it would be amazing to give people the chance to make a virtual visit to Jokkmokk and experience the market through the website - but also to let market visitors write greetings that the rest of the world could see on the website. After all, that is not hard to do. I also suggested that they should add a photo stream, a few interviews, some press releases, maybe a podcast or some videos, and regular news reports from the market. I even offered myself to create and maintain a new official market website with these features for free!

But good ideas are only good if they come from the right person. And appearently, I was not the right person to build a website - or even suggest website improvements. The site owners declined my offer, and a few months later they paid a huge amount of money to a non-local company which created a new official website for the market. I was still happy about this, since I expected an amazing site because of its high cost. But once I saw it, it was a big disappointment…

Nothing had really changed, the site is still not good. It is totally static, and built in an unprofessional and outdated way with a massive nested table layout and no kind of optimization. Huge blocks of code are commented out, and believe it or not, there are 29(!) images on the frontpage. How many of them can you spot? CSS is only used to style the links, and the HTML is not even close to being standards-compliant. Index.html gives 125 errors in the validator, which pretty much says it all. As for accessibility, the new site doesn't even live up to the WCAG single-A rating or the Section 508 guidelines, which is something I would DEMAND from any site that is built by a professional designer today. The lack of search engine optimization (not one meta tag or header in sight), interactivity (not even a contact form) and the initial load size of 162856 bytes makes the whole thing really sad. But atleast there are a couple of exciting animated .gif advertisements to enjoy, hooray…

But why do I care about this? It is their mistake and not mine, and I didn't need to spend several days on building a site without getting paid for the work. But I still wish I had, because of one simple reason: I would have built a much better website than the one they have now. That is a simple fact. No matter how the comparisations would be made, the free website that I would have built for them would still have been better than their current site which they paid a lot to get. And even though noone will ever want to admit it, that means that all the money that was spent on this new website were totally wasted. Hopefully the arrangers will realize it some day and listen to me next time I talk about websites. After all, it is one of few things that I know really, really well. And my offer still stands: I will build a new site for the market next year if they let me do it. And I would still do it for free. The winter market is an amazing event, and it deserves an amazing website…

By the way, the same offer goes for the official website of Jokkmokk, which really needs to be rebuilt now. It has looked exactly the same for more than seven years, so a total reconstruction is definitely needed. I have promised to build that site for free as well, and still include the full functionality of a commercial enterprise-level CMS into the site to make sure that it will work for all its users and visitors. I know what kind of features and functionality that is needed for a site of this size and type, and I have both the skills and the tools to to the job. And since I am the only professional web designer in the Jokkmokk area who can write standards-compliant code, I don't feel bad about saying that I think I am the right person to do the job…

But I know my hometown and the lack of technical knowledge among the people who make the decisions. Many people believe that the more expensive a website is, the better it must be. I can understand that, because it isn't easy to know for someone who don't know webdesign. But I really, really hope that they listen to me before they make the decision, so I can explain how it really works. It will save them a lot of money.

But enough whining, this post is way too long already! Tomorrow will be spent on finishing the gallery and the small teahouse that I will have in the second room of the studio. According to the official program, I will open on Wednesday. I won't. I will open on Thursday. But I will start reporting about the market from tomorrow. See you then!