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.

Yesterday I gave another interview, this time to Swedish technology news site IT24.se. The main topic was still templates and plans for the future, but the article also mentioned the new website that is launched within the Tjuvlyssnat network today: Tjuvtittat.se!

Tjuvtittat! is a simple photoblog where Damon and I will post funny and strange photos that are sent to us by the readers of Tjuvlyssnat. It will hopefully add another dimension of entertainment, a little bonus for everyone who enjoys the kind of humor that Tjuvlyssnat is based on. Damon explains more about it in this article (also from IT24.se).

Note: All links to sites in Swedish. But this photo on Tjuvtittat may work well in English as well…

Are you a US citizen and currently attending a full time post-secondary education? Do you build WordPress themes? Then you should read this entry carefully for a chance to win a $5.000 scholarship from CollegeScholarships.org!

College Scholarships are launching a new WordPress-based site called New Scholarships and the site needs a new and fresh design. In order to get that, a web design contest is launched where participants can create and submit entries - which need to be in the form of complete WordPress themes. A number of well-known web design profiles (including Paul Stamatiou, Steve Smith, Darius A Monsef IV, Bryan Veloso, Darren Rowse, Jonathan Snook and me!) will review the entries and find the best entry. The winner will recieve a $5.000 scholarship from The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation!

The deadline for submissions is very close: August 13th (midnight PST), and there is currently not many entries so this is really a good challenge for those of you who can take it on! Besides the chance of winning a scholarship, you will get your work reviewed by people who truly know the art of web design…

Entries are submitted via the form on the the scholarship site . If you have any questions, there is more information and contact information on that site as well. Since I am one of the judges, I can't answer any questions or give any recommendations. But the directions are clear: Make a good theme for the new scholarship site, and hope for the best. Good luck!

Please spread the word!

Tjuvlyssnat.se, the Swedish humor blog that I have written about a couple of times before, was yesterday presented in a new format: on paper! The Tjuvlyssnat magazine is published by Egmont, and it contains both classic posts from the site and new material, along with a cartoons, interviews and other illustrated material. I haven't seen it myself yet, but I'm hoping to get a copy of it tomorrow.

Tjuvlyssnat.se started out as a Swedish version of Overheard in New York, and it has been one of the most popular blogs in Sweden for more than a year now. I joined the Tjuvlyssnat team as webdesigner and webmaster in January this year, starting out with editing CSS on the then TypePad-based blog - but ending up moving the entire site out of TypePad and rebuilding it with WordPress and an own custom WP-theme. It has been a great project to work with, and now when the blog is growing into an own network of blogs (on several different topics) and new ideas like the magazine, I'm preparing for even more adventures. More about that later, for now I'll celebrate the magazine and hope that it will be well recieved!

Since the release of the first two Daleri themes for WordPress I have got a number of requests from users of other blogging tools, asking me to release versions of the designs for Blogger and sNews among other systems. Extracting the design from the WordPress themes can be a bit hard, so I will do it for you and release both theme designs as regular XHTML/CSS-templates as well. If anyone who reads this would want to do a port of the template, let me know and I'll send it over as soon as it is ready.