andreasviklund.com

I have a long tradition of not writing about christmas on any of my websites. Whenever I have written something about the christmas season, I have usually combined christmas with new years eve and written about both holidays as one single thing. The reason for this is that I don't really like christmas. I used to love christmas when I was younger, but since I lost my mother six years ago, a lot of the things I enjoyed with christmas are lost. Instead, christmas has been one of the times when I was repeatedly being reminded about sad things.

It isn't until now, six years later, that I feel ok about christmas again. Today the most important thing is to spend some quality time with the family, and to have atleast one traditional christmas dinner. I'm skipping most of the other traditions, and aim at the single holiday that I love most of all…

New Years Eve!

New years means a lot to me. The symbolic value of finishing one year and starting another is something that many people use in different ways, but I use it a whole lot. It may perhaps be because I need to compensate for the lost christmas, but even when I was a kid there was something special about the arrival of a new year…

Looking back at 2006 I can say that it was a really good year, probably the best one in a long time. I could write an entire book about things that have happened during the year (and what I have learned from it), and I could probably also write a whole lot about my plans for the next year. But I know by experience that things usually don't go as planned, so this time I am not setting up any traditional targets. Instead, I will allow myself to be a bit visionary towards a very exciting future!

Same material - but more extras

The first thing to do will be to improve myself and my work in as many ways as possible, and in order to do that I will make a number of changes and updates. Lots of things will be re-organized and even changed in the beginning of 2007, including many things on this website. You will of course find all the things you can expect, like my (music, the templates and [WordPress themes-wordpress-themes], and of course also my blog. And it will still be served in the same simple, free and useful way. But the way i work will change, as I will spend much more time on blogging, releasing templates and updating themes. And each part of the material will have additional material added to it, like image source files for the templates or sample packs for the songs, just to give a few examples!

As promised, I will start blogging for real and write a lot more often. Probably every day. Maybe even twice per day, if I have something good to write about. The reason for that is simple: it would be really fun to do! I love writing, and I love reading my old diaries and archives. More posts may not make the blog any better or any more interesting to read, but those of you who are currently reading my blog to follow my life and my work will get a lot more material to read every day…

The blog direction

The main topics for my blog will basically be the same as today, following the material that I release on my site. However, the category structure needs to be refreshed. I may possibly replace the categories with a tagging system later on, I haven't decided on that yet. But the current categories system is not very good so something will need to be done. These are the main topics that I will write about:

• The diary. My everyday life and adventures - and history.
• XHTML/CSS design. Templates, themes, reviews, tutorials, news, extras…
• Web standards, accessibility, optimization, code quality…
• My local area (Jokkmokk and northern Sweden in general) and places I visit.
• Production, performance and distribution of electronic music. Artist life.
• Graphics design and digital art, photo editing and manipulation.

This is of course not a complete list, only a couple of topics that i believe will get many posts. I will also write about other things, whenever I find something interesting to write about. But I will not jump into the echo chamber and start repeating other bloggers posts about the latest cool video or "web 2.0" tool, there are way too many blogs that do that already. I will do my best to make sure that each post actually says something, and I will of course listen to all feedback that I get and try to keep as many readers as possible happy. If you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, worries or questions, feel free to contact me share your opinion!

The next step

The next thing to do will be to launch the new design. The updated templates (and the new ones) will appear on my template page on OpenDesigns.org first, and then be added to my own template page once the new design is online. Any day now, I'm working on it right now. Expect some live testing soon!

And finally, I would like to thank each and everyone of you who have visited this site and read this blog during 2006! The site has had almost 600.000 unique visitors this year (1.2 million visits and 8.6 million pageviews in total!), and it is of course much more than I could possibly have imagined. I hope that you will hang on for the new adventures in 2007 as well!