andreasviklund.com

After a day with several travel hours and a long and incredibly interesting meeting, I am now taking a short break to post this blog entry and write a couple of e-mails. I didn't write very much about the meeting that I was going to attend, but I will write more about it later for sure. This is just a short status report, I'll post photos and reflections later.

As mentioned in the previous post, I was invited to a national blogger meeting about with a small number of selected bloggers from different parts of Sweden. The meeting was hosted by Telia who are the main sponsors of the Swedish national qualifying contests for the Eurovision Song Contest. The national contest is a major event, one of the most viewed TV-shows in Sweden. It gets massive attention in national media, but it is also a hot topic in the blogosphere. The meeting took place in the TeliaSonera headquarter in Stockholm, located at Stureplan. It was really interesting in many ways, and it also gave us a chance to meet some of the contestants from the different qualifying contests. It was really fun to meet these young artists, full of dreams and expecations, heading into this major frenzy with all their heart. I still haven't heard their songs, but after meeting the artists I am looking forward to the contest in a way that I haven't done before.

About a year ago, I went to Stockholm to attend the release party for the first Tjuvlyssnat.se book. It was an interesting trip where I met a lot of interesting people and had lots of fun. The trip provided me with a good amount of inspiration for my work with the Tjuvlyssnat network of sites and it gave year 2007 a flying start. Now it is time for another trip, once again with a blogger meeting as the main event although this time the host is the Swedish telecommunications company Telia and the topic is music and entertainment!

Like last year, I will bring my laptop and write a post from the event, but the trip will add a few more days of delays to the site update. I wasn't brave enough to make all the changes on the live site as I wrote in the previous post, so I ended up working on a private development site after all. As expected and as I mentioned in my previous post, I spend a lot more time on experimenting and testing different things when I work against a development site. Getting the job done takes much longer. However, it should also makes the end result a bit better. I am really happy with the new structure as it looks so far. With the trip coming up with very short notice I will lose two work days, but in return I will hopefully find a lot of fresh inspiration and a number of new ideas for the blog and for my designs…

Updated templates

If you want to see a preview of my updated website templates (XHTML/CSS only, no CMS-specific versions) you are very welcome to download this preview package. It contains seven updated templates: andreas00-05 and 1024px. It is not the final releases, I still need to run my regular quality checks on each template (validation, speed, browser compability, accessibility, spelling, links etc.) and re-format the CSS since it is currently written in the compact way that I like it rather than having each value on its own line which is makes the stylesheet easier to read and edit. The rest of the templates will be added to the file as the templates are updated. The final release will be made once all templates are updated and found to be OK. As promised, I will also release a number of new templates, including a universal Daleri template with the design from my own site and from the Daleri Selection theme for WordPress. Expect a preview of the Daleri template soon, I'm working on the last layout variation for it now and I may possibly be able to finish it in Stockholm.

Takeoff is five hours away now. I'm going to catch a few hours of sleep, hopefully waking up to a will become a short but interesting trip…

Over the next two days, this site may look like a complete mess. Most details are ready for the upcoming design switch, but the design is the easy part. I will also re-structure a large part of the content (including old blog entries and pages) to make it easier to use tags rather than categories and to add new sub-pages the different parts of the site. As I have written earlier, each template will get a page of its own where you can see a larger screenshot and download additional material and previous versions if wanted. More information about each template will be available, such as number of included layouts and file sizes. I will also add a FAQ for each template, and have a couple of how-to's available as well.

Since my official target for this site is to add something new to it every day after this update, I want to make sure that the content is structured in a functional and future-proof way. I could have done all of this on a development site or locally on my computer, but I know myself well and I am very aware of the fact that it would take much more time than needed if I did it that way since there would be room for experiments and for taking breaks whenever I wanted. So in order to force myself to do it quickly and in an effective way, I'm going to do something that I would never recommend anyone else to do. I'm going to make several of these changes live directly on the site. It is definitely not a pretty way to do it, but it will force me to work fast and not stop until the job is completely done.

So don't panic if something is broken, it will hopefully result in an improvement in the end!

As planned, the new year started with a whole lot of webdesign work! But instead of updating my own site according to the original plan, I have spent my time on working on other projects and designs. I was hit by an attack of template design inspiration which you will see the result of soon, and I have also assisted Johanna with a couple of projects that she has been working with. The result is three new launches that are well worth a look!

JokkmokksBHK.se

The first is the website for the local dog club: Jokkmokks BHK. It was built from a modified version of the 1024px theme for WordPress, translated into Swedish. Johanna is the new webmaster of the site and she has made most of the work herself except for the template editing.

Kennel-Anthems.com

The same can be said about the second site, her all-new dog site Kennel Anthems. It is a static website built with the andreas04 template as the starting point. The site is pretty faithful to the original design, but a lot of work has been made to add the content in a pretty way and make sure to keep a good site structure. I got really proud of Johanna's work when I ran a XHTML/CSS validation check on the final site and realized that the only thing that did not validate was a line in the statistics script that I had added. So much for my webstandards skills…

Elven.nu

But most interesting of all is Johanna's own blog, Elven.nu which has got a completely new theme. It is a variation of the design I've made for my own site (which should have been online by now). We may possibly release a public version of the theme, but I will make sure to get my own version online first to make sure it works as it should. Check it out, and feel free to let me know what you think of it. It is not advanced in any way, just a bit traditional in terms of the large image-based design. It looks very similar to my 1999-2000 designs, back in the days when nested tables and browser-specific code was considered cool…

Anyway, the silence here is definitely not a sign of a bad start of the year. The year has started in an amazing way, with very promising news about music production as well. I'll write more about it in the next couple of days for sure.

When I write this, the new year is less than 30 minutes away. I won't make any summary of the year that has passed, but it has definitely been a good year in general. Not a perfect year, since I have gone through a number of crashes and faced a lot of problems. But still a positive year which has created opportunities to give 2008 a great start and hopefully make it a year of adventures and interesting challenges…

There will be a number of changes coming up soon. The new site design is completed, and I'm hoping to launch it tomorrow (January 1st) as planned. I'm back into music again, and not working alone on a hobby level any more but instead being a part of a professional team. An announcement about that will be made some time into the new year! New template content has been created, the WordPress themes are being updated, more related content will be added - and 2008 will also see a new site section for royalty-free digital art that you can use for free in headers, as backgrounds or in any other way you want to.

The future looks interesting, and I'm ready for new adventures. Thank you all who have followed me and supported me during 2007! I hope that you'll be around in 2008 as well, and I sure hope that I'll be able to provide you with useful, free and high-quality material again. I know myself good enough to not make any final promises, but I can give you one guarantee: I'll do my best. At all times.