andreasviklund.com

I've made a number of updates and changes to my two public themes for WordPress, and both 1024px and WP-Andreas01 has been given version numbers 1.5.

Most changes are bug fixes. But I have also made some minor adjustments to the template files, and added some things that have been missing. For example, both themes now have the calendar in the sidebar by default. If you don't want it, just remove it. With the WordPress widgets plugin you can build your own sidebars easily, since both themes support the plugin.

I have also added the comment display in 1024px so you can see the number of comments for each post, and a default "Home" link at the top of the pages menu. In WP-Andreas01 I removed the thin gray lines between the main content and the sidebars, and I made the sidebar header text a bit smaller. The sidebar padding that caused a visual bug in IE6 should hopefully be fixed now. I haven't tested this yet since I don't have IE6 on my laptop, but I'll check it tomorrow on Johanna's computer to make sure it is fixed.

Swedish theme translations

Another new thing is that I will make Swedish translations of these themes available on Jokkmokk.biz. WordPress has a localization feature, and themes can be built in a way that makes them easy to translate to different languages, but I have chosen to not prepare my themes for localization yet. I will probably do it in the future, but as long as I keep on changing and updating the themes on regular basis, they can only be translated by rewriting the template files manually. I'll try to collect all translations soon, when my new site design goes online and I start adding more content to this site. Feel free to send me links to translated versions at anytime to make my work easier!

Tonight is theme testing night on andreasviklund.com, as I am going to test my new site design live on the site. The new look will be really simple, really clean and really boring. In other words, exactly what you could expect from me. The main differences are that the design is wider (1024px-friendly), has an expanded header section and a third column - and steps a bit away from the classic blog layout that I use now. It will also have a completely different menu and page structure, to make it easier for me to add new content later on.

My current site menus are terrible, as each and every one of them are hardcoded. Each page in the main menu on the top has a sub-menu in the sidebar, and whenever I add a page somewhere I need to make changes in several places in the code. A nice feature that I have now is that the "parent page" in the main menu is highlighted no matter which sub-page the visitor views. I managed to do that by abusing the conditional tags, and it is done in a really bad way that makes updates a pain. Each time the header is loaded, the conditional tags says "If the visitor is on page X, Y or Z, then highlight parent page A in the main menu" - for each of the menu options. This system was built for the first version of this site more than one year ago and it has worked really well, but today I can do it in a much better way. In the new theme all menus will be generated automatically, and it will make it more fun to add new pages…

But I'm not happy with how everything works yet so the new theme will not go live tonight, I will just try it out to see if it works as I want it to so far. Among other things, I will switch to some other archive format since my current archive is getting a bit hard to overview. I'm looking at different alternatives now, to find a compact but still functional solution. One possibility is that I use the Kottke Style Archives plugin (found through Weblog Tools Collection) in combination with something else. I don't know yet, so if you have any good suggestions for good archives I would be happy to hear them! I will also add some new features, but it will not be anything special. Just things that will make the site more fun to work with, and hopefully also more fun to visit.

The first round of testing will be done with the site in maintenance mode, which means that you will see a temporary "offline" message during an hour or two. Once everything is tested, I'll probably run the site with the new theme for an hour to see how it works live. If you happen to see this and want to help me out, please let me know if you experience any errors or problems. If nothing works, check back in an hour or two and everything should be back to normal again.

Just a quick update about updates and new versions of some of the tools I work with every day…

Software

A new version of my favorite CSS design tool, Style Master, has been released. It is version 4.6, and among the news it has IE7 added to the browser list. If you are interested in CSS-based web design I warmly recommend you to try Style Master, it is simply a great tool (commercial, US$60).

And while I'm into design software, I also found a new version of my favorite code editor, Notepad++ (freeware). Version 3.9 has been out for more than a month, but it is still new to me.

CMS / Scripts

WordPress has also been updated, this time into version 2.0.5. I'm planning to upgrade this site today, but I'm still waiting impatiently for version 2.1 which has lots of new features that I'm looking forward to use. I'm running a recent nightly build (labelled as v2.1-alpha3) on one of my test servers, but even though it works really good so far I'm not brave enough to use an alpha version on my main site…

And finally, sNews v1.5 by Solucija is out in a third release candidate. I have tested it, and I will definitely want to use it in future projects. If you need a well-structured, lightweight, simple and easy-to-learn content management system for your site, it could be a great idea to give sNews (which is free and open sourced) a shot. If you want to learn more about sNews, also check out these resource sites: sNews.ca, Free-CSS-Templates, mysNews and the sNews forum.

Quick news today, some are perhaps old news but still worth posting:

My WordPress themes (and a few others) have been translated to Turkish…

Swedish translations of all my WordPress themes and website templates will be released at the end of the week (or possibly during the weekend) on Jokkmokk.biz. And there will be new templates, as promised a hundred times now.

I'm doing a theme co-operation project with Ajay D'Souza, in order to get some fresh inspiration and someone to exchange ideas with. It will hopefully result in a theme later on…

And finally, speaking of themes I will soon start to send out my new (and so far unreleased) template series to CMS theme coders and porting specialists, who want to get their ports out at the same time as the template release. I did this for the andreas00 template, and it was very appreciated so I'm trying it again. I will make atleast one of the WordPress theme versions myself, and then I will invite one or two theme designers to do the other ports. But other than that, everyone who would be interested in taking part of this project can send a porting request to me. Tell me which CMS you will port to, show one or a few examples of previous themes and let me know how long it till take to get the port ready - and I'll send you the template(s) back.

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.