andreasviklund.com

For the last couple of months, I have had a small sponsored link in the footer of my templates and WordPress themes. That sponsored little link made it possible for me to work as a professional template designer - building up a lot of templates and themes and spending several hours per day on helping people with both my themes and with WordPress in general. It has been a really lovely work, and it is incredibly awarding and inspiring to help other people. I've learned a lot from it, and I can feel good too since many people have appreciated the help.

But that ended today. A few people have expressed worries about these sponsored links in the WordPress themes, so my sponsor has decided to cancel the deal. The result for me is less time for free work and more time for commercial project for now. I am still interested in sponsoring deals, not for the WordPress themes but maybe for templates and for this website. Suggestions and ideas are very welcome!

And speaking of that, I am trying a new advertisement service from Text-Link-Ads.com right now. It is called "Feedvertising", and it puts a similar sponsored link at the bottom of the entries in my feeds. If it looks strange right now, it is because no links have been sold yet. I have no idea how it will work, but as always I want to hear what you think about it. Is this acceptable or just annoying? Do you have any experience of it that you can share? Let me know! If you want to try Feedvertising yourself, sign up as a publisher on Text-Link-Ads.com and you can get it too.

And not to forget: If you want to advertise in my feed, you can do it from here.

In a sudden attack of inspiration, I built a new theme for WordPress last night. It is inspired by another of my own themes, 1024px, and the general layout is basically the same: 2 columns with the widget-enabled sidebar, a fixed width made for 1024px screen width (or higher) and a very simple but very functional structure.

Returning visitors may also remember the "Anvish" theme test some time ago. Anvish evolved into a customized and branded commercial theme for a client, so it was taken off the release plan. But this new theme has a similar layout, and even though most of the theme code is re-written from scratch I have used a few pieces of the original Anvish stylesheet. And I have spent some extra energy on making it accessible (WCAG AAA-rating) and SEO-friendly, and it seems to work pretty well.

Along with the WordPress theme, I will also release an XHTML/CSS template based on the same design in case someone wants to port it to some other content management system. Since this all happened so fast I have not had any chance of asking for ports before the template release like I did with andreas00. However, if anyone would want to port the design to any CMS and can do it quickly, send me an e-mail or post a comment and let me know which system you want to port it to. I will send copies of the template out to everyone who wants it, but only to one person per CMS to avoid duplicate ports. And I will of course add a link to your port inside the template so that it is easy for people to find.

More ported templates! The andreas00 template has been ported into a theme for Plone by Jon Stahl. As far as I know, it is the first theme for Plone that is based on one of my templates. A screenshot and a download link is available on the theme page.

And as if that wasn't enough, both andreas01 and andreas09 have been ported into Typo3 extentions by Dmitry Dulepov. Once again the first templates that are ported to that system. The extentions are labelled as beta versions, so it may be a work in progress. I am not familiar with Typo3 so I can't really tell, but Dmitry is one of the Typo3 core developers so it will be very interesting to see these ports live!

Thilak Raj Rao has ported the andreas05 template into a theme for WordPress. I haven't tested it myself, but it looks simple and useful. And it has support for widgets too, so it is easy to customize. To preview and download the theme, check it out at the theme viewer!

Note: Thilak is looking for someone who could help with preparing the Andreas05 theme for localization. If you can help, post a comment on any of the theme pages.

WP-Andreas01 update

Speaking of WordPress themes, I have fixed some bugs in WP-Andreas01 and I'm planning to release v1.5 of the theme very soon. If anyone have any specific requests or suggestions about WP-Andreas01, send them to me right away and they may end up in the new version. There have been many requests for a custom header image feature, such as on wordpress.com, but once again my very limited PHP skills stop me from doing that. If anyone would want to help out with it, let me know as soon as possible! It would make many users happy…

Just a little sign of life, here are some template-related links that may be worth checking out:

Blogger/Blogspot templates by Gecko and Fly
A site where you can find a large number of nice Blogger/Blogspot ports, including several based on my free website templates. What I really like with these ports is that many of them are modified, fooled around with and improved in different ways. For example, check out this lovely 3-column remix of andreas07.

Website Baker themes by Peter Mathijssen
Another collection of themes, but this time they are customized for the Website Baker CMS. Several themes are based on my templates, although Peter's ports are more faithful to the original designs. You can also find designs by other great template designers, such as Jenna, Pat and Luka. Well worth a visit, and a must-see for Website Baker users.

sNews.ca - An sNews portal site by Doug Brydges
sNews is a small and simplistic content management system by Solucija. It is lovely to work with, since it has a lot of very useful features for such a lightweight system. sNews.ca is a site dedicated to help people get started with sNews, and even though it was launched very recently it has a lot of useful material. The site is based on a modified version of my andreas04 template, and you can actually download a pre-configured version of sNews 1.4 with the customized design used as the default template!