andreasviklund.com

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…"

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.

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)