Archive for the ‘Site’ Category

Tuesday January 17 2012, 7:16 pm
5 Comments »
Posted in Site, Yada Yada | | Archive

Yeah I said I wouldn’t blog until I had upgraded Worpress and made a new layout but as it turns out that might take forever. I’m currently going through the CSS for the latest WP default theme, trying to figure out what code does what. I don’t remember since I’ve changed my WP theme’s code beyond recognition. Moved around things, changed name on everything, deleted some parts, added others. Translating the WP code is a tedious process which basically goes down like this: delete line, reload page, does the layout still work? If yes, continue. If no, undo, change something in the code. Do you see the change? If yes, continue modifying that area. If no, move on for now. Sounds like fun, yes?

It’s 7:11 PM and I’m super bored. I’m having one of these days when I feel like doing something different than what I usually do. I want to start some kind of project but I lack inspiration. I want to go out and do something but there’s nothing to do. Too cold and dark for a walk and too late for shopping and things like that. So I’m sitting here in front of my computer. Enough with this! I’m going to try to find something to do. If all else fails there’s always cleaning. Yes, I clean my apartment not only when it’s needed but also when I’m bored.

Plugs: tiff k, Katherine, Ria, Kristine, Angie

Monday January 9 2012, 8:56 pm
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Posted in Site | Tags: | Archive

I haven’t upgraded Wordpress in forever so I’m working on that and while upgrading I’m making a new layout as well. I won’t blog until I’m done with all that. I’m not sure how long it will take but don’t expect any updates here in at least a week or two.

Plugs: Euri, Massa P, kitty, Deanna, Katherine, [lisabjernhagen]

Tuesday November 1 2011, 5:18 am
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Posted in Site | Tags: | Archive

Et voila! Whirlwind has a new layout! My last layout stayed up for a whopping one year and ten months which is the longest one of my layouts has ever stayed online. And that is ever as in since I put my first site online back in early 2000.

I’ve been terribly uninspired when it comes to web design but thanks to making journal skins at DeviantART I got back into the groove. Journal skins are themes for the in-site journals at DA and are pretty simple things coding wise. I guess that’s partly why I decided to make a real layout. I got tired of the limitations of the DA journal skins.

It wouldn’t have taken me so long making a new layout if I wasn’t all over the place when it comes to creativity. I do many things but I focus on one thing at a time. Last year it was digital painting, then this year it’s been resources in the form of journal skins, Photoshop brushes and vector/PNG stock. I get very caught up in what I’m doing and focus strictly on one thing for months at a time. Having many talents is my blessing and my curse. I never excel in anything because I have way too many creative hobbies. If I focused on one thing instead of ten I would become very good at one thing rather than pretty good at ten things.

By the way, if you’re using IE 7 the layout will look completely fucked up. If you’re using IE 8 it won’t look as pretty as it’s supposed to. If you’re using IE 9 everything but the custom fonts will work.

I’ve always made hacks to make my site look good in shitty shite IE too but I’m getting sick of it. As everyone who’s into web design knows IE sucks and older versions of it ignores CSS standards. That’s why I’m tired of making hacks. There’s nothing wrong with my code. The problem is completely and entirely IE.

Plugs: Sam, Karin, Joebs, Erin Nicole, kitty, Sammy

Tuesday April 19 2011, 9:11 pm
16 Comments »
Posted in My home, Photos, Site | Tags: , | Archive

Hello! It’s been a while but I’m back now. I didn’t mean to take a break from my site. It just happened. Weeks became months and I didn’t have time nor energy for blogging. Like most of you probably know I recently moved from Hultsfred back to Västerås, the city I lived in between 1999 and 2004. Packing up my home and then unpacking it was a tedious process. Then I had to decorate my new apartment which included a lot of shopping and some furniture renovations.

The apartment itself has also been undergoing renovations. When I moved in the place looked kind of shitty. The kitchen was absolutely horrible with sloppily painted purple walls, a ugly beige floor, a tiny stove, a malfunctioning fridge and a dirty ceiling. The rest of the apartment was also very dirty since the last tenant didn’t clean it as well as he should have before he moved out. I know my rights as a tenant so I complained about the walls, the fridge and the cleaning to the landlord who had the fridge replaced, the kitchen walls and ceiling painted and the apartment cleaned. I also got a new stove. And I got all of this for free. With the new floor I paid for myself the kitchen is now almost fully renovated.

Kitchen before renovations.
kitchen before

Kitchen after renovations.
kitchen after

(more…)

Plugs: Manda, Joebs, kitty, Deanna, Afef, Katherine, Angie, Ria, Jess, Lilly, Sam, Karin, Lotte, Becca, Kivi, Jazmiin

Wednesday February 9 2011, 11:16 pm
8 Comments »
Posted in Site | | Archive

The font plugin I use for the headlines is acting up, hence the not so pretty look of my site right now. I’ll fix it when I have the time. After I’m done unpacking and decorating my place and after I’ve written two essays. So yeah, it might take a while.

Plugs: Sam, kitty, Jenn, Anna, Stepherz, Ria, Christie, Afef

Monday August 30 2010, 9:14 pm
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Posted in My home, Photos, Site | Tags: , , | Archive

Time flies. Summer came, stayed for a while and is now about to leave again. I’ve been busy living, doing the usual things but in the warmth of the green and blue season. I think I’m back to blogging now that summer is over but don’t take my word for it. After all I’ve made such promises for months now without getting more than a maximum of six posts up every month. Anyway, we’ll see what happens. Moving on! :)

I turned 27 the 29th of July and I promised I’d show you photos of what I got so here we go. Besides these things I also got money.

Rug which fit my kitchen perfectly.
black and white damask rug

Movies: Bridget Jones Diary, Push and Chicago.
movies

Books: Drömmarnas flod (River of Dreams) by Gay Courter and Alltid Amber (Forever Amber) by Kathleen Winsor.
books

I wanted a cake with strawberries so my family made me one. Strawberries is a must when your birthday is in the summer. :)
strawberry cake

Another lovely thing that happened this summer was the trip to Stockholm I did and the cruise I went on. The 4th of August I took the train up to Stockholm to visit my friend Milla and on the 6th I met up with my family for a one night cruise to Finland. You can look at the photos here.

As you can see the Happenings gallery is up and running again. It’s my photo blog where photos of the things I do will end up. That means everything from parties to walks in the nature. Photos of the latest stuff I bought and such will still be shown here in the blog.

Other than that today is a big day because it’s my first day of school this term. This fall I’ll study 3D modelling, Graphic design for the web, Information Technology and Swedish working class history. The first three classes are more or less related to web design but the last one is purely for fun. Contrary to most people I find politics very interesting so I’m really looking forward to this class. Studying graphics will be great as well since I’m ok at the coding part of web design but suck when it comes to creating graphics.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I want to finish this with thanking those who stick with me and my blog even though I so rarely update it nowadays. Lots of love to you.

Plugs: Maria, Angelica, Grace

Tuesday July 27 2010, 1:38 pm
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Posted in Site | Tags: | Archive

Some of you might remember that Whirlwind used to have a art gallery. I took it down last year after major remodelling of my site and haven’t had the motivation to re-code it to fit the new code until now. For several hours this morning I’ve worked on putting together a new art gallery. It’s the same old art but I’ve also added a couple of photographies. I’m no photographer but when you take thousands of photos every year of anything and everything you’re bound to snap a few that actually looks good. Going through my photo folders I found seven… That is a pitiful number considering the total number of digital photos I have but mind you I haven’t gone through all of them and mind you again most of my pictures are taken at drunken parties and aren’t really suitable for a serious art gallery. But don’t you worry if you really wanted to see me and my friends making arses out of ourselves. My next project is to get the Photo Blog gallery up and running again. That’s where stuff like that will end up.

Anyway, have a look at the new creativity gallery which holds my art, furniture design, sewing and photography.

Plugs: Olivia H.

Tuesday February 2 2010, 6:36 pm
7 Comments »
Posted in Computers & Internet, Site | Tags: , | Archive

I hate how many Wordpress plugins contains invalid code. It’s probably valid if you use the Transitional Doctype but I use Strict and therefore have to change these codes. The problem is that the plugins are written with code far more advanced than anything I can do so it can be quite a hassle to figure out what I can change and delete without messing up the entire plugin.

I’m kind of obsessed with having my entire site validate correctly but why shouldn’t I be? Valid code is like correct spelling. Sure you can read a text that’s badly spelled but it’s probably harder to understand. It’s the same with browsers. Sure they can display invalid code but often it looks kinda funny and not at all how you intended it to look.

What I hate even more than invalid code is code that’s valid but works differently in different browsers. This layout should work fine in all browsers besides maybe the most unusual ones but I think that has more to do with those browsers not being that good than my code. Still, it’s annoying. I remember back in the days when you coded for one browser and put up a disclaimer stating which browser (and resolution) your site should be viewed in. Not very user friendly, but still, easy. ;)

It’s interesting to think about how coding has evolved in the past ten years. When I built my first web page back in 1999 I coded in HTML and didn’t use any CSS whatsoever. My first site was basically two frames. One with a text link menu and one main window for the content. The menu frame had a black and white background with tree branches (a photo I scanned) and the main frame was black. It didn’t look too bad considering what many other sites back then looked like. I’m proud to say that Whirlwind never have contained ugly clipart, dolls or annoying moving GIF images. Besides my celebrity blend phase I’ve always kept it pretty simple, not using too many colours or too much graphics.

I wish I still had my first layout saved but every layout I made up until 2001 were lost years ago. There wasn’t that many of them but still, it would have been cool to be able to look at them.

When did you start web designing and what did your first layout look like?

Plugs: Marie Claire, Lady, Kristen, adastra, Rose, Dee, Malin

Thursday January 21 2010, 5:04 pm
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Posted in Site, Yada Yada | Tags: | Archive

And then it hit me. For the first time in a long time I’m actually doing what I really want to do. Not just for the day, not just for a weekend but with my life. I’m doing something with my life that I truly want to do. When I really think about, actually for the first time.

You see high school doesn’t count, because even though here in Sweden you choose a major most of the courses you take are mandatory ones you haven’t chosen yourself and can’t get out of. The jobs I’ve had doesn’t count either since sure they’ve been all right but not what I want to spend my life doing. I want to work as a web designer and now I’m studying web design, moving towards that goal. For the first time in my life I’m actually doing exactly what I want to do. And it makes me feel oddly at ease. Right now I can ignore the fact that I hate the town I live in. I can ignore problems in my life. Because at least one piece has fallen into place. I’m moving forward and I’m kind of happy.

Uni is going well so far but I’m expecting it to get harder. So far I’m doing nothing but reading in my Flash Animation class and the first assignment in the CSS class is so easy it’s not even funny. Right now I fear that class will only involve things I already know. If that’s the case I guess it’s not too bad anyway. I’ll get a good grade and having studied this class I’ll be able to get into a more advanced one next semester. I reckon I continue with my studies this fall and right now I’m even considering studying through the summer as well. That will insure I have a income between June and August and I do need a income. If you live with your parents not having money for three months might not be fun but you can manage, living alone and not in a dorm though it’s absolutely necessary to have a income every month. I guess I could get financial aid of some kind during the summer but why not just keep studying? Besides that one maths class in 2008 I haven’t studied for eight years so I don’t think I’ll run out of motivation for a while.

Moving on, from a serious subject to a not so serious one.

Just looked at my little “to do list” for my site. I don’t think anyone but me understand much of it. And if you don’t speak Swedish you understand even less of it since I mix Swedish and English. It easily happens when it comes to site related matters since after all, my site is in English and so is all code but Swedish is still my first language. Just look at this confusing little list. Even I have trouble remembering what all this means when I haven’t looked at it for a while.

twitter time link
linkimages shadow
tags osv underrubrik
image background shadow
image address /
80×15 banner pink
whirlwindarchive swe ww
galleries divs i wp?
sidan hoppar vad göra?
bakgrundsfärg playlists + 1px för mkt top
copyright inte x2
searchbar

Anyway, this is the current list of things I need to fix on Whirlwind. Everything from looking into whether there is a way to use div tags within a Wordpress page (and with the help of div tags set up the gallery) to making another banner. I always have at least three things on my site related to do list. Whirlwind will never be “done”. There’s always something to fix, things to do better. Sometimes that bothers me but I know always striving to do better really is a good thing.

Plugs: Malin, Grace, maria, Lady, Cara, Daniella, Ravencroft

Monday January 11 2010, 10:20 pm
17 Comments »
Posted in Site | Tags: | Archive

New layout! Yay, yay, yay! I call it “All Bats Are Grey”. If you know of The Cure you’ll probably get it.

I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent working on this one but somewhere between Friday and Saturday I stayed awake for 36 hours, coding non-stop. It was all worth it in the end, of course, because here it is and I love it!

I noticed something when I upgraded Wordpress. I’ve always uploaded my photos into www.whirlwind.nu/images but now even though I haven’t changed the image code the photos won’t show! If I use use the full adress img src=”http://www.whirlwind.nu/images/pic.jpg” it works but not if I use img src=”images/pic.jpg” like I’ve always done. What is this? Why is this? Is it because they want you to use the Wordpress media manager update thingy or whatever it’s called? Well I won’t because I’m old fashioned when it comes to coding. I upload by FTP! I wish Wordpress wasn’t so automatized. I want to make changes in the layout by coding, not by changing settings in the admin panel. Like I said, old fashioned. It’s just the way I’ve always done things.

The gallery isn’t up yet. This is because I made major changes in the coding. The only part of my site ran by Wordpress used to be the blog section. All other sections (she, site, gallery, www) were my own code. I preferred it that way but making first one layout for Wordpress and then another one looking exactly the same down to the smallest pixel, while it was structured in a totally different code, was a real pain. You really couldn’t tell it was always two layouts and I’m proud of that. Enough is enough though. It’s just too much work. First making two layouts and then making sure those two works in five different browsers (I test in Opera, FF, IE, Safari and Chrome). So, now my entire site is ran by Wordpress. Not the way I prefer it but I just can’t be bothered with all that extra work any more. Now I need to figure out a way to structure my gallery. I don’t think the way I coded it works in Wordpress, with using pages and all. Oh well, I’ll figure something out.

So, what do you think? See any errors? Let me know if something isn’t working like it should. Thank you!

Plugs: clarity, Maria, Angie, Malin, Marie Claire, Aly, Alice, Ravencroft, Jessica, Joebs, Nikkole, Pim, Kristine, Kristen, Zanna, Deanna

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