andreasviklund.com

Yesterday I realized that I will not be able to pay for monthly renewal fee to my web host in time. For almost two years my hosting account has had the 7th of every month as the renewal deadline. When I upgraded my hosting account a month ago, I expected the date to remain the same. I made arrangements to pay the monthly fee on January 5th, which is a bit ironic since I thought "I will rather pay two days early this time than challenging destiny by waiting to the last day"…

However, the upgrade was made on December 3rd, so the renewal date was changed. The four last days of my previous hosting solution (the Elite VPS service from SiteGround) had been lost along with the money I had already paid for those days. Now, I don't really care about that. It was just not what I expected.

I contacted SiteGround immediately when I discovered the changed date and asked if I could make the renewal on Monday the 5th instead, while keeping the site online in the meantime. With the lost days in mind - and given the fact that the customer support is usually great - I don't think there will be any downtime this weekend. But just in case the site would go down for some time, please be aware that it is only temporary.

Updated January 3rd: There will be no downtime. The excellent tech support at SiteGround moved the renewal date to January 7th. Problem solved, and I can move on with the suiting up!

I mentioned my idea to start blogging for real, just for the fun of it. The plan is still on, once I have got the inspiration to clean out old and outdated material from the site. I did consider to use some other domain for the blog in order to keep things calm and quiet, knowing very well that most visitors here are many times more interested in my work than in myself. But after all, this is my online home and the domain that my friends and family associate me with. It is also the site people find if they search for my name, so why make things complicated?

There will still be plenty of work around, and I will also provide a bit more insight on what motivates me to do what I do - and to keep my templates free. Anyone interested in the human behind the code will be able to find out a lot of useless and boring information, but I'll make it easy to filter out interesting and relevant content through categories and tags. Once again, as soon as I have cleaned out the dust.

I will also need to refresh the design a bit, since it is currently very static and non-personal. Having recently starting to watch "How I Met Your Mother", I'm adopting the lovely catchphrase "Suit up!" to get that work done - although in the simple and useful way that makes me who I am. Expect no dramatic changes, but atleast (hopefully) some improvement.

Thanks everyone for your support and encouragement through e-mails and comments (both on the site and offline), it has removed some of the hesitation. I hope that you will be around during 2009 as well, and that this silly idea will make me spend more time on working with the site - and the material on it. It has been needed for years, really, so you are actually helping me help others.

Now, let a new year begin, and may new adventures come with it!

Within the next couple of days, I'm upgrading my hosting plan. You may see some downtime, but if so, it is planned and for a good purpose. I will be back with news once the upgrade is complete - and I think that atleast a few of you will like the story. See you soon!

Updated a few hours later: Ok, that didn't take as long as I had expected. The upgrade has been made already, andreasviklund.com is now running on a dedicated server from SiteGround! It is a major upgrade in terms of features and performance, which at the same time reduces my hosting costs with $20 per month. I am typically wary about making changes to my hosting, but this was a fairly easy decision to make. And thanks to the great support team at SiteGround, the switch has been completely pain-free.

The upgrade is perfectly in line with my ideas, plans and priorities for 2009. I am planning to bring this site to life again, now that we (Johanna and I) have got a good start with our company and it looks like our idea will actually work very well. While I have not written anything special for a long time, I am actually planning to start blogging again. Both about templates, CSS and other topics that may be interesting to the typical visitor of this site - and less interesting everyday posts about my life in general, and the many adventures and challenges that makes life worth living.

I already know that most people will find a personal blog boring. But it will be fun to write, because I love writing, especially documenting my life and sharing my experiences with others. And I have stories to tell, if there is someone out there who care to read it all. But I'm writing mostly for myself, atleast to start with. I have learned a lot from reading my old diaries. Besides, it is a good way to practice my English, while at the same time giving you a face and a story behind all the HTML and CSS code. And this is a personal website after all!

But don't worry, I will also post tutorials, how-to:s, tips, bonus materials, site reviews, software reviews, photos (which will be released as an own image bank of stock photos, free for everyone to use just like my templates) and music. And I'll listen to requests, feedback and ideas. If you would want to see something special, then let me know. For example, I've been asked to show the post comments under each post, not have them hidden as I have now. I will definitely change that back soon.

I have not set any official launch date for this restart. I tend to miss those kinds of dates, and I have several times lost track and inspiration when not being ready by my own deadline. So I'm not setting any date. I'll just start right away, without making it complicated or dramatic. Now that I have the hosting upgrade done, the next step is cleaning out old and outdated posts and re-structuring the site content. Basically, most of my old blog will disappear. A fresh start can be worth a lot, but it will happen gradually to make sure I don't lose the inspiration this time. An upgrade to WordPress v2.7 is also planned, as well as upgrading my themes…

Good plan or lousy plan? Think I'll manage to make this happen? Feel free to share your opinions and feedback!

…one and one still is one…

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

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…"