The site has been in in a movement phase for a few weeks. The layout has looked weird in many places, text blocks has looked strange and messed up, some links hasn’t worked. But now the update is 99% finished, just some minor cleaning up on some stuffed away pages and update some old buttons. None of those are really important, and I am very busy this week, so I’ll consider this update done for now! Complete! And just tune those last small things some day when I have some spare time.

This whole update started with that I got fed up with Blogger for my blogging needs and decided to make the switch to Wordpress. Blogger has worked okay for me in the past but lately I’ve got the feeling as an FTP blogger I got left out of all the new love. So with the move to Wordpress I am indeed very happy now when it’s finished, as I have much more control over the blog part of the artstorm site than I ever had before. The unpleasant part was that I was running on a Windows server earlier and had to make the switch to an Apache server to be able to run Wordpress. And it also took me some time to customize my Wordpress template to the artstorm look.

So I had to rewrite all my scripts for the rest of the site, which I had originally written in ASP and used an Access database to feed the content with. As I have had my focus on lot’s of 3D work lately, the web site update had to be done in the background when time permitted, and that’s why the site has been a bit messed up for a while.

But now everything is rewritten in PHP and I am using a MySQL database instead for the content. And the Wordpress blog runs smoothly next to my other content. I decided to update a few other things with the website when I anyway was messing around with it. So I improved the overall design, to make the site easier to read and hopefully give my visitors a better view of what I publish here, as well as adding some soon to be used functionality for quickly adding flash content to the site, streaming flash video content that is. Let’s see what I might have in store in that area.

So all parts of the site has got some love and attention and been updated now. For the first time I decided to use a non web safe font for my headings. Oh, the humanity. But it just looked so good, and it’s just a small percent, mainly Mac users, that will be affected of not having this font. Anyway, it selects some pretty good web-safe font if it doesn’t exist so no biggie really.

I also updated my URL naming policy to make these transitions between server technology go unnoticed in the future. Alas forced me this time into a massive battle with my redirects to keep my Google PR for as many pages as possible despite the new naming convention. But with a little messing around with my .htaccess files the ranking seems to have passed through to most the new pages in just a few weeks, and I guess the rest are not that far behind.

Alright, that’s it for now. I hope the site will continue to run smooth and I can focus on the much needed update of content in my portfolio and add my showreel and other things to the site.

Until next time!

Woah, I finally got disillusioned. I’ve had a brownish design of artstorm over the last years. But a few month back I killed it of for a lighter white design for the reasons I wrote about in this entry, artstorm is dead, long live artstorm. Well, a few months later when I’ve got some perspective to the design and been living with it over the time, I realized that I never got the cosy at home feeling with it. I simply didn’t like it.
So I took some time this weekend to fix it to something I like, so here we go again. Coffee colors all over the place. And oh, I like it so much more. So this new look will be the one that will be here to stay for quite some time. I also took the opportunity to fix some other problems that have been a disturbance to me and also removed all transitional HTML code and rewrote all pages to XHTML 1.0 Strict/CSS. The blog software also got updated to the newest version at the same time.
So bye bye, artstorm light…

Designing Music: Caesars Palace - Cherry Kicks

Many years has passed since the site opened its ones and zeros out towards the world in dark, moody and brownish colors.

This weekend I felt it was time to kill of that design and give the site a more simplified lighter style, which doesn’t compete with the artwork in getting the attention.

Bye bye brownie….

Web Redesign Music: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm Remixed

Still alive over here!
Well, I must honestly say I’ve neglected the artstorm site way to much for quite some time. Makes me a bit sad. But lot’s of work have come in the way, so I haven’t really found any time to spare at this thing for a long time.

But now I’ve got things going a bit again anyway. I moved to a new better server the last week, and the move went smooth as a baby’s bottom, and I’m up and running on a much more stable place. But stability was not the only cause of my move, I was desperately urging for some more advanced server features that I’m going to need for some things I’ve planned for the artstorm site.

Keeping secrets is nice, and what new interesting things I intend to do with the artstorm site, will reveal itself during 2006. Lot’s of my personal projects have been going on even though I haven’t really dabbled with the site, so I’ll play a little catch up for some time to get back on track with portfolio updates and progress of my short movie projects.

I also started redesigning the site about a month ago, some changes which have already gone online, but the update is still somewhere in between, so that’s why the portfolio pages for instance look a little weird at the moment, and the text layout is not really perfect everywhere.
Well, I know I shouldn’t publish half made site updates, but, well, I did it anyway. But I’ll fix it at the end of the week.

Okay, I won’t ramble on too much now. Expect a new posting soon, and stay tuned for some nice updates shortly.

Oh, the the Gothenburg Filmfestival is going on now as well, http://www.filmfestival.org, lot’s of nice things for me to do there. Okay, that might cause a week delay until I get into the updates of the site. Film festivals always have a high priority.. :)

Live well! I’ll soon be back!

Well, if I don’t have enough to do, I do make sure I keep myself busy. Guess who forgot to go to sleep tonight and found himself still staring into the cosy glow of my computer screens at 8 a.m this morning. I’m probably one of those mutants that have forsaken the term sleeping.
Anyway, I got rid of my own hacked together blog scripts and replaced it with the robust Blogger engine. Well, my scripts did work quite well as a blog, but they never seemed to get finished, and I went back patching up stuff in them all the time when I discovered problems or bugs. What made the cup tip over was a few days ago when I noticed in my server logs that the MSN Search Robot had indexed a couple of 1000 pages from my site. Huhu. Several 1000 pages? Do I have that? Nah, but the robot had discovered a loop hole in my blog script and indexed about every date from 1997 up until 2025 or something like that. Where all pages reports “this date contains no entries.”. So that pushed me over the edge, and late yesterday evening I decided to start using my Blogger account instead. From the beginning I thought it would be quite a painless transition, but hey, you know how it is, nothing is painless!

The problems came when I was to tailor made the blog output to conform with the rest of the design of my site. So I spent the entire night learning about Strict XHTML coding, XML, RSS and Atom feeds and everything else related to the new web standards. Well, never hurt to know about it, so well, I guess it was well spent time in the end anyway. So sometime in the early morning hours I started to get happy and began transferring all my old data into the blogger database instead. And now it seems like everything finally works just fine.
The Blog is much prettier now, better organized, more functions and possibilities. And if you are using a modern web browser (ie, anything other than Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer), you can add a live bookmark to this RSS feed presented at this page, to get the bookmark to update automagically when this blog is updated. Pretty nifty don’t you think?
I also programmed an ASP parser tonight for the Atom XML files, to feed the frontpage with blog entries as well, and it seems to work just fine as well. So the site might not visually have changed very much, but the backbone is so much better now. There is still some minor adjustments for me to do, but they are just cosmetically like font colors, positions and sizes. So I’ll finish that tonight.

I’ve pretty much fallen in love with all the functionality that Blogger offers and all customization it allows for. If you’re thinking of starting blogging, I definitely recommend to check it out.

That wraps up this post. Got a pretty productive night after all. And when I was messing with the site I also took the time to update some design flaws here and there in the coding, so now every single page should validate with 0 errors no matter if it’s a strict XHTML coded page or a loose HTML coded page through the World Wide Web Consortiums Validator, as well as their CSS validator. And that I’m pretty pleased with.

Oh and not to forget, tonight’s music choice;
Working Music: Anna Ternheim - Unreleased “Demo” Album
(Her wonderful music and voice helped me through the late hours)

Alright, so what’s up? Well, the Julie character I’ve been working on is more or less done. It’s online anyway, even though the last image is missing. But it’ll come online soon.

I’ve started using both a print service and a mesh service, DeviantART and TurboSquid, and updated the site to take advantage of these new features. Not very much online yet, but the content in each store will grow constantly from this point forward.

I also added a relation feature to the Blog script, so work in progress images belonging to the same project easily can be tied together, with a WIP link from the final image. Might be of interest to some to be able to go back and check how the images I create progress forward.

New projects - Well, I’m torn between a couple of things right now, so I haven’t decided which one to give the highest priority yet. I’m wrapping up the last post production on Julie to make sure I get nice prints. But when that’s finished I’ll have made my decision. The next blog entry in a few days will probably be the first Work in Progress of my next project, so my decision will be made until then.

I noticed in my ISP’s logs that I have had almost 8.000 visitors on the site since I opened it up just a little bit more than a month and some weeks ago. Well, I’m happy for that but it gives me such pressure now to start filling up the portfolio and project pages with more interesting stuff. I’ll work on it, promise!

I can’t believe it myself, it has gone 2 years since I took the site down to remake it, and I have done a couple of tries where I’ve almost been done, and then trashed it as I didn’t really like it.

Well, now I actually fixed it in one day. I’m happy with the site, every section is up and running. It’s easy to update. The site is clean and easy to navigate around. So now I’ll let it be. The site is done.

I’ll just have to start add some more content to it, in form of images and animations. But as I wrote on the portfolio page I’ll try to keep it as recent as possible, so instead of me going through old material, I’ll add whatever I create from this point and forwards in time.

I have lot’s of stuff planned for the autumn, so expect lots of new imagery to appear on the site in the coming months.

Well, put some more work into the site today, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out so I decided to open up all parts of the site.

Some areas will still be under construction for some time, but they will be finished pretty soon according to my plan. Not very much left to do, so I better finish it up now when I have some inspiration to do this web thingie, so I can put it aside and get back to LightWave again.