andreasviklund.com

After all is said and done…

Andreas — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:51:14 +0000

…one and one still is one…

A line from one of my all-time favorite songs. Coming soon to an editor near you.

Away goes the dust…

Andreas — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:51:26 +0000

After another long time of total silence, I've finally got started with cleaning up the site and removing outdated content. Which is basically all the content except for the website templates. Most blog posts will be deleted in a day or two to give room for something new. Perhaps a new attempt at blogging, perhaps just regular posts about templates and themes. I have a number of them piled up for release since a long time, but you have all heard that before so I'll spare you the promises this time. I also hope that I'll get the WordPress themes page sorted out in a similar way as the templates page, because the themes page is still terrible…

Speaking of themes, I have just found out through this post that WP-Andreas01 has reached 25.000 downloads on the official WordPress themes directory, making it the 2nd most downloaded WordPress theme on the site after the Tarski theme. With thousands of bloggers using the theme live today, it is a shame that I don't have any other info about it than the short presentation on the themes page. The template pages update turned out to work really well, so I'll do something similar for the themes.

Another detail is the music pages. I haven't hosted any music on this site in a while, except for the TSEC album "Dreams". The Lagoona collection and all my own songs from way back in time, has been online on an external server but the files have not been linked from here. The plan was to move the songs to a regular music site, but I never found the inspiration to get it done. Instead, I gathered the best of my own material into two albums and published it through a torrent linked from The PirateBay. I'm planning to organize the albums in some better way as well to keep the old tracks alive for those of you who enjoy the old tunes, but when it comes to music today I would rather look forward into the project I have joined this year, the Leeloo Project. I will write more about that during the winter, although probably on the official band site (once it is launched) instead of here.

This site will remain my own hiding place, my "online home" as I once defined it. And I will probably put most of the work into free website templates, with two toes placed in the WordPress community through my theme design. Again, this is easy to write. I don't know how well it will work out in reality, but I know one thing for sure: I will not leave any old stuff floating around. And I will not get any more logo design offers because of the 3 year old logo design request that is just collecting digital dust in the archives…

"This is Andreas, and as far as you know, this will be attempt number seventyfour…"

Peaking the charts

Andreas — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:20:38 +0000

First of all, music! Only four days after posting a link to the old Leeloo Project music page on the classic free music site Beatmaka.com, the three Leeloo Project remixes are ranked #1, #2 and #3 on the Beatmaka music chart.

While it is not very hard to achieve (Beatmaka appears to be very silent nowadays), it brings back warm memories of the Lagoona era and the way producers tried to outshine eachother with new and fresh songs. There are still some amazing tracks to find on the site, so it is a bit sad to see the low activity.

Second, WordPress themes! Since the opening of the new WordPress theme directory and the release of three of my themes there, I have browsed through lots of great themes. And I've followed the "most popular" list with big interest to learn more about what makes a theme more interesting.

Yesterday I noticed that WP-Andreas01 was one of the featured themes on the frontpage, and that it is currently the most popular theme out of the 145 that have been made available on the theme directory so far. It was a nice surprise that gave an extra boost of inspiration. I know that it will be pushed away from that spot very soon, but I can't help being a bit proud about it. After all, the andreas01 template which the theme design is based on, was the first website template that I ever released. It is just amazing to see that it still finds its way out to new users more than three years after its original release…

No time for celebrations though! Johanna and I are very close to an official launch of our web development company, but we still don't have any own company website online so that is one of the priorities for now. The company is named Ileva after my ILEVA idea, and I am happy to announce that there will finally be official Ileva templates out there. Not as an open source design concept, but with the same idea behind the code. And of course still free. I will write more about it in future posts, for sure.

Preview: The Leeloo Project

Andreas — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:22:48 +0000

I have mentioned the Leeloo Project before, and referred to it as my new band. Things are slowly starting to happen, and the official website will be launched soon. I will probably write a lot more about the band and the adventure that it will be (not to forget, the amazing skills of Perzzon, the other half of the duo) but I'll save that for now and just post an interesting link to classic music site Beatmaka.com where you can listen to three full remixes for free:

Listen to The Leeloo Project (click the "play" buttons)

WordPress theme news

Andreas — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:29:57 +0000

With the opening of the new official WordPress theme directory on WordPress.org, you will see a number of changes on my WordPress themes page. I will have as many of my themes hosted on the theme site as possible, and I am now uploading the themes as they are updated. Two themes have been approved so far, WP-Andreas01 (updated to v2.0) and the new Daleri Sweet. 1024px is awaiting its review and approval and will probably be added in a few days.

You can see live previews of the themes, grade them and find many other good themes on the site, and it is well worth a visit even though the number of themes is low so far. All themes are reviewed in detail before approval to ensure that they meet the requirements for being hosted on WordPress.org. All my approved themes are listed on my userpage, and you can also subscribe to the andreas tag to stay updated on new releases and updates.

Free ringtones for your mobile phone

Andreas — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:53:37 +0000

In my slowly ongoing project to organize my old music and sort out the best pieces, time has now come to do something about all the many intros and semi-finished songs that I have made over the years. Out of about 150 unfinished songs and a few released ones, I have gathered 12 tracks in different genres that have one thing in common: They are all suitable as mobile phone ringtones. Short, melodic and instrumental, these old clips (made between 1997 and 2002) are not that good - but if you want a somewhat different and pretty unique MP3 ringtone in your phone then you may want to listen to these songs.

The files are released in the form of an MP3 album which is simply called "Ringtones". Like all of my music, these songs are free to download and free to use. And free to share with your friends if you would want to. All I ask for is that you leave the ID3 tags intact. Here are the direct download links:

Updated: The links have been moved. The ringtones were downloaded in thousands of copies and my server couldn't handle it very well. I did not expect that kind of interest so I'll need to organize it in some other way soon.

How to customize a website template

Andreas — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:02:05 +0000

…or rather one out of many possible ways to do it:

This screencast by WebBriefcase shows how to edit a copy of andreas07 using a visual editor, without having to write any code at all. It shows only the basics, but it may still be interesting to see since it shows one of the best things about using templates: You can get a complete website done very quickly, and the result can be really good.

WebBriefcase has a lot of other interesting articles and tutorials for site owners, bloggers and template users - it is well worth a visit.

And another one: Daleri Mega

Andreas — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:23:00 +0000

The new free website template in the Daleri series, Daleri Mega was not made with simplicity in mind. It was made to give you options and variation. With 2-5 columns, the same kind of menu that Daleri Structure has (although expanded) and fluid width it is a pretty advanced design for coming from me. But it is of course still usable and functional, validating as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 - and working well in all modern browsers that I have tested it with - including my mobile phone. Like the previous release, this is a mostly text-based design. The .zip download size is 5 kilobytes…

Here is the screenshot, click it to go to the template page where you get links to downloads and a live demo. Once again, this is a co-operation with B4Contact.

Download: Daleri Mega v1.0 (5 KB .zip)

New CSS template: Daleri Structure

Andreas — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:28:47 +0000

The Daleri Structure XHTML/CSS website template has now been released! It is a mostly text-based design with several different menu options, made with content-heavy websites in mind. The main menu is made in a way that works differently than my previous templates. It is a definition list with four columns, with an optional horizontal link menu and the possibility to add nested lists of link buttons in the sidebar as well. The layout can have 2 or 3 columns, or a combination of both. The layout fits the standard 1024px width, but it can easily be narrowed down to 800px or made fluid if wanted.

Download: Daleri Structure v1.0 (18 KB .zip)

Daleri Structure was released in co-operation with B4Contact and Web Designers Sharing Point. If you would want to port it to WordPress, Drupal or any other CMS, please let me know and I'll make sure to link to the ported versions from here.

In other news, all my old templates have now been updated and given their own template pages. See the new template gallery for the new versions. Among the last templates to be updated, I would like to give an extra push for andreas07 v2.0 which wasn't just refreshed - it got that third column that so many have asked for. It ended up being really cute!

Swedish themes for WordPress

Andreas — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:48:28 +0000

Edited: For Swedish readers: WordPress-teman pÃ¥ Svenska