andreasviklund.com

Welcome, year 2007! I know I am a few days late with the greeting, but I haven't had any chance to write this post until now. Having promised lots of updates, changes and new material for months, I have a lot to live up to now. But first…

New years eve

I had been looking forward to the new year celebrations for weeks, knowing that it would be a calm and relaxed party with some of my very best friends, lots of good food and lots of humor. And it was. The original plan was to invite people to our apartment here in Jokkmokk, but instead we ended up in a house in Mattisudden a few kilometers away. It turned out to be a highlight. We had a great taco dinner, mixed a few drinks and got a lot of laughs as old memories were brought up. With only a minute left of the new year we went outdoors to toast as the new year arrived, and then we started 2007 with three more hours of stories and memories. It was a great time, thanks to the great company!

I didn't get much sleep though, so when we got back home the day after I went to bed in the late afternoon - and I didn't wake up until the morning after. A quick check on the site stats revealed that Dreamtemplate.com had been running a promo campaign with free template downloads over new years, which earned the site a storm of visitors from Digg and other sites. This got an effect on my site as well since links to my site were posted in the Digg comments, so the site started the year with wild numbers.

New design?

The new andreasviklund.com design that I was planning to launch on January 1st was never finished. I got pretty far with it, and I will probably end up releasing it both as a WordPress theme and as a regular website template. But I never got completely happy with it, no matter what changes and modifications I made. I tried to finish the design work at times when I didn't have enough inspiration, and the result was a design that simply didn't feel good.

The holiday stress was probably a factor, I lost two weeks of working time because of my hurting jaw during December and I am still trying to catch up with delayed projects after that. But I also think that I wanted to make too much of it, and it grew into something much bigger than it should be. I'll make another try soon, but with a bit more realistic targets this time. Atleast I can feel confident knowing that no matter what I make of it, it will be an improvement from the current design.

In the meantime…

While I failed to launch my new design, other sites are showing up new and really cute faces! Weblog Tools Collection has got a great new design, a complete makeover that looks really well. And my soon-to-be primary download location for my website templates, OpenDesigns.org, has now got its design (made by the amazing Pat Heard of FullAhead) online. Check these sites out, they are worth it.

Other things possibly worth checking out are:

• Dutch WordPress themes - including WP-Andreas00 and 1024px.
• MODx CMS 0.9.5 - Includes a custom design by me.
• The Open Design Community - just in case you missed it the first time!

Final thoughts

It is a bit tempting to write the usual "2006 summary" and "2007 predictions" posts, but I'll skip those for now and put my energy on delivering what I have promised instead. Expect the first release of the year as soon as tomorrow. Or possibly tonight, if this inspiration attack lasts for a few more hours…