In my ongoing online re-organization work, one of many projects is to reduce the number of domains and minor websites I manage in order to use more time and energy on a few high-priority websites. Several of my sites are non-public and used only for specific purposes, such as developing and testing free WordPress themes or showcase a custom template, theme or marketing idea for a client. It is useful to have a separate development site for WordPress themes, but impractical to have six such sites because of all the extra maintenance work it takes to keep the sites up to date.

I also have a couple of small and public sites that don't have any actual purpose. One such site was andreasviklund.se where I made an attempt at writing a Swedish blog some time ago, only to give up on that plan after a few days. Instead, I ended up using the site to promote a couple of Swedish WordPress themes and a free MP3 album with 12 short and instrumental songs that could be used as ringtones on mobile phones.

My .se site had about 50 visitors per day in average over the last 6 months, despite the lack of updates. The themes (which are hosted by the official Swedish WordPress portal WP-Support.se) were downloaded in 1.800 copies in the same period, while the ringtomes were downloaded in approximately 7.000 copies. Those are actually surprisingly high numbers. But compared to the stats of this website and the amount of maintenance that every WordPress-based website needs over time, it was a lot of work for a very limited effect.

With the Swedish blog idea abandoned, the Swedish themes hosted successfully by WP-Support (where I used to provide free theme support during last summer - something I will need to take up again) and the ringtones soon being included in the big music collection I mentioned in my previous post, I could not come up with any good reason to keep the WordPress site online. I decided to take it down and replace it with a single template-based website with contact information and links to my high-priority websites. I decided to go with my andreas07 template.

Setting up the template site

The process was really simple. I used andreas07 in its original form, changed the language to Swedish, removed everything that I wouldn't need (including the navigation menu) and added my own content. I also changed the default link color fron red to blue, and added a photo in the left sidebar. It took me only 10 minutes to create the page from the template. I know it doesn't look very pretty, but it will definitely do the job for now. I can always improve the design at some later point.

Adjusting the new site to work with the history of the old site took a little bit longer since I wanted to do it in a proper way. Before I deleted the WordPress site, I made sure to copy the generated XML sitemap. I created a custom .htaccess file where I made manual 301 redirects for the URLs in the sitemap, to make sure that people who try to reach the deleted pages of the WordPress site are automatically redirected to index.html instead of seeing an error message. I also created a separate "Error 404" file which I made into the default 404 document in the .htaccess file. And finally I added a rewrite feature that removes the "www." from the address if a visitor has entered it.

With the template-based site and the .htaccess adjustments ready, I uploaded the new site and tested it live. It worked as intended and validated without any errors, and after saving a last backup copy of the WordPress site I deleted it. The new andreasviklund.se is now live. Feel free to take a look and comment on my first own andreas07-based website!

The re-organization continues tonight with an upgrade of andreasviklund.com and the two Swedish humor blogs Tjuvlyssnat and Tjuvtittat to WordPress v2.7. There is still a lot of work left to do, but I'm on it and it feels very good since it has been needed for quite some time now..

170+ MP3 songs in various genres, adding up to more than 12 hours of music, sorted into 9 (or possibly 10) MP3 albums. Every single file is fully ID3-tagged and includes the proper cover art. And the entire package (which is still untitled) will soon be free to download from this site, free to share and free to use for non-commercial purposes.

It will be an almost complete collection of the music I have created - or been involved in creating. The collection will include almost all Lagoona releases, along with a large number of remixes, co-productions and maybe even a few live tracks. It will be my way of finally putting an end to the amazing music adventures of my past, and let me move on to the next adventure in the world of melodies.

Expect the release and a longer post about this topic in a few days.

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…"

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)

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.