andreasviklund.com

The step-by-step approach mentioned in the previous post seems to work a little better for me, even though I haven't made any major changes on the site yet. Instead, I started with turning my home office into a major mess - emptying every box and making giant piles of CD:s and DVD:s on the floor. I spent two days going through all the stuff, throwing away everything that I didn't consider to be valuable and sorting the rest into clever archives that will be very useful for me. In some way, the ideas of having a good structure and a high level of accessibility works well in real life too! I re-arranged the electronic gear as well, moved cables and set up my old Novation K-station so that I can use it when I produce music. And not just through MIDI, I'm bringing the K-station vocoder back to life so I can actually sing with it!

What's up with the music?

I am pretty sure that the music production will take up a whole lot of my time this spring, and I have felt a constant flow of melodic ideas and inspiration since I joined the Leeloo Project in the beginning of the year. The Leeloo Project has been a one-person artist name for several years, belonging to Joakim Persson who is a long-time internet friend of mine. I have co-operated with him on a couple of songs in the past ("A different reality" and "ALW", for example) and back in year 2000 he did a nice remix of the classic Lagoona track "The promised land" (click to download his remix). Joakim has pretty much the same musical background that I have, but when I took a break from music a couple of years ago, he kept on working and studying music production in detail. Today, he has developed a fantastic sound - lightyears better than I could possibly do myself. He tried to get in touch with me for quite some time, and when I finally wrote back things happened quickly. He needed original material, melodies, inspiration and figured that I could perhaps help him. And I knew that I could never get anything done by myself so I needed someone to work with, someone who could finish what I started and bring in new ideas and quality productions to my basic concepts. It seemed like the two of us would be a perfect match, so I asked if I could join his Leeloo Project - and the project is now a duo.

We have already recorded our first official remix, a house edit of Ellen Lindblads "Nu är det fest i byn". You can hear it on Ellen's website (click "Musik" and then the "Leeloo cut" at the bottom of the page under "Remixer"). I will write a lot more about Leeloo Project in future posts and in a few days we will open our own website on LeelooProject.com. Stay tuned!

And the templates, themes and everything else on the site?

After the big refreshment of my work area, I feel confident that the website needs to be given the same treatment. The blog is full of old posts that are way out of date, incorrect and pretty much useless. Links are broken, numbers are no longer correct. And I do not need this logo anymore. Yes, I still get e-mails because of that post, almost every month someone offers me a great logo - usually after finding me through a Google search like "logotype wanted". The old posts are a good source of visitors, but I don't feel good about having outdated content on my site so I will probably remove a whole lot of posts. And maybe also re-organize the categories, and add tags…

I am still not sure if I will keep writing a blog here at all, I don't really know what to write and I don't want to be too personal since most people are here for the templates - and not for me and my opinions. I may possibly make andreasviklund.com into a pure web design website (with focus on free website templates) and keep blogging about templates related topics. Template reviews would be interesting to do, as well as template site reviews. But I am still undecided, we'll see about that. I know for sure that I will need to add more advertisements, or I will not be able to keep the site online at all. But thanks to the great feedback and high interest for the template sponsorships mentioned in the previous post, that will not be any problem.

Now, the main priority is to add these template pages. And the new templates. That will be what happens next, starting tonight and tomorrow. As soon as the templates are all up-to-date, I will clean out the blog and update all the other site content. That includes the WordPress themes which are slightly outdated as well since I haven't been able to upload new versions to the official WordPress theme viewer. Until the Theme Viewer is updated, i will host the themes myself and do it in a similar way like the templates - with separate theme pages for each theme, and related material and a sponsorship spot for each theme as well. Anyone who is interested in sponsoring the themes and have their banner or link(s) on the theme pages is very welcome to contact me. In a day or two, the pages will go online and I would love to have the banners on place by then!

Swedish versions of the templates and themes

Another project with a somewhat lower priority at this time is to release Swedish versions of all my templates and WordPress themes - and a couple of unique and original templates and themes in Swedish. There are not that many original WordPress themes in Swedish and almost no well-coded website templates in Swedish, so this will be an interesting project to do. I may possibly launch a Swedish website for this material and for a personal blog in Swedish (I own andreasviklund.se already), but I have put that a bit down in the to-do-list in order to get this site in good shape first. I still wanted to mention it here, för mina svenska läsare. Alla fyra. :)

Final words for today

Now I'm off to run quality tests on the updated and the new templates. And once that is done, you'll find them on the templates page - along with their new template pages. Check back tomorrow and the first ones will be there! If it is not, I promise to call it a day, close down the site and declare my future template design career hopeless. I have considered giving my job up more than once, but even though I am often a terribly slow worker and a master at not keeping deadlines or even my own word, I am still proud of the things I have managed to do through my templates. And if there is a chance that I can continue helping more people through my work, it may be worth fighting for. Especially when I get so much encouragement through friendly and caring comments from so many template users and site visitors. That means a lot, seriously.

When I write this, the new year is less than 30 minutes away. I won't make any summary of the year that has passed, but it has definitely been a good year in general. Not a perfect year, since I have gone through a number of crashes and faced a lot of problems. But still a positive year which has created opportunities to give 2008 a great start and hopefully make it a year of adventures and interesting challenges…

There will be a number of changes coming up soon. The new site design is completed, and I'm hoping to launch it tomorrow (January 1st) as planned. I'm back into music again, and not working alone on a hobby level any more but instead being a part of a professional team. An announcement about that will be made some time into the new year! New template content has been created, the WordPress themes are being updated, more related content will be added - and 2008 will also see a new site section for royalty-free digital art that you can use for free in headers, as backgrounds or in any other way you want to.

The future looks interesting, and I'm ready for new adventures. Thank you all who have followed me and supported me during 2007! I hope that you'll be around in 2008 as well, and I sure hope that I'll be able to provide you with useful, free and high-quality material again. I know myself good enough to not make any final promises, but I can give you one guarantee: I'll do my best. At all times.

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.

During the last two weeks, I have felt much better than I have in a long time. I've been able to do much more, to be more creative and actually get things done. All in a way that has reminded me about how I used to work years ago. I have felt that the energy has slowly started to return, and it has been a great feeling.

Today, I called my doctor to get an update on the latest blood tests that was made last week. Even before I explained why I called, he could tell that I should probably feel better than in a long time. The tests revealed that the anemia treatment has been very effective: The blood is completely restored to a perfectly healthy level. I still don't know what was causing it from the start, so I need to continue the treatment for yet a while to keep the levels up. But some clues have been found and I've been told that I should not worry too much about it.

In other words, the boosts of inspiration and the ability to spend all night long working on some crazy idea that I got from nowhere, was not a co-incidence. I have been slow, tired and lazy for years, all for a reason. Having found the error and a way to restore it, I should be able to do a lot of exciting things that I've avoided for a long time. Perhaps it is time to bring back the music again?

Local newspaper Norrbottens-Kuriren has an article about my work today, following up the current interest for website templates and for my ideas about making a living from giving away things for free.

The article is written in Swedish, but I recommend everyone to take a look at it anyway since there is a pretty photo of me, Johanna and little Elven in it! Johanna has done a lot of invisible work by helping and supporting me in many ways since we first met more than seven years ago. She is an amazing person and naturally a big part of everything I do, and the fact that she is getting into template design as well makes our project a lot more fun to work with. I am a lucky man…

Edit: The other local newspaper (NSD) runs a similar story today. It is a bit longer and more detailed, and since the interview was made more than a week before the NK interview I still have hair on my head. Summaries in English will be posted here in a day or two.

NK: "Snällhet lönar sig"
NSD: Webbdesign från lilla Jokkmokk