Why a website?
I’m usually a quite shy person, especially around other people. I tend to sit among others, listening to their conversations and watching their reactions rather than participating. With this presence on the web, I get a chance to share my thoughts and opinions with the rest of the world at my own leisure, instead of forcing myself into speaking up in public at times I don’t really want to. I really don’t care how many people read the articles on my website, as long as I have somewhere to blow off some steam. If I can get people to read and react to it, as well as participate in discussions about those topics, then so be it!

Who runs the website?
On the visual and contents end of it, that would be me, and me alone. On the technical end of it, I’ve been a customer of ProHosting since mid-1998 (although the traceable records “only” go as far back as October 1999). But, with my new version, I required a little bit of extra attention than I wanted to bother the ProHosting staff with, so I placed this on my rented virtual server at Linode‘s datacenter in London, UK.

How was this website made?
What you’re looking at now, is the third incarnation of my website. Again, the blogging type of website. Although the design looks the same, the main changes have been made to the back end of the system. The very first version had a pretty long runtime, reaching back to 2002, when I first bothered to create a proper website for me as a person (as opposed to me as a business/programmer).

The second version also had a pretty long runtime, reaching back to 2004 and up to early 2010, and the graphics of this website (with the exception of the cam image and the link buttons, of course) were back then all made in Paint Shop Pro 8, which was already back then a powerful alternative to the widely used Adobe Photoshop (Corel has long since bought up Jasc, who originally made the Paint Shop Pro series, and I’m still using that product line today). Back then I also created everything you could see from scratch, down to the publishing engine (articles and comments, along with the topic splits). At that point, I was using (warning, technobabble ahead) PHP together with a MySQL database as the back-end of the website, with the use of XHTML 1.0 and CSS as the front-end interface for the browsers, all of which are still my preferred technologies when creating a website from scratch. The script I wrote to dynamically resize the cam thumbnail image up in the right-hand corner is more or less the only bit of programming left of what I created from scratch back in the day.

So what’s new about this version?
I’ve finally gone over to WordPress as my blogging platform, just to make things easier on myself. It plugs into just about everything (including Windows Live Writer, surprisingly enough), and although I had planned my new blogging platform to be a serious improvement on what I had created before, I simply couldn’t find enough time to sit down and write code for it. And around the crossover from 2009 to 2010, I finally gave up and went for an already completed solution out there. As I was very satisfied with my old design, I chose to recreate it as a WordPress template for my website, just to integrate it firmly into a nice blogging template.
In my previous version, I had improved some basic programming, and wrote everything from scratch. The way I had programmed it also meant that I had to hand-type any HTML code in every blog post I made, which usually meant I postponed my blogging for when I had time to type HTML code.
Before that, I used Newspro (later named Coranto), which was horribly outdated even when I started using it (last version ever published of these was in October 2001).
I’ve kept my latest redesign from 2004, which was previously black and shades of dark blue to white and bright. That old version was created in June 2002, which means it was about time I did something more about it.

The previous version was also a multi-lingual version of the website, available in both English and Norwegian. However, when I ranted along (like I usually do, once I get going) and got to the end of my rant, I felt I had nothing more to add or subtract to my post. In turn, that meant that I simply couldn’t be bothered to translate my entire post to Norwegian (which was usually the case), and the Norwegian “section” of the website was more or less abandoned, collecting dust. In the new version, I’ve added a category for Norwegian posts, which I will assign a post to if I choose to write a topic entirely in Norwegian (which is more likely than what I had before).

Can I advertise on your website?
Yes, you can. After some thought, I’ve decided to allow direct sponsors with my site, but then, on my terms. See my sponsor packages for further information.

Can you review my product/website?
Sure, but keep in mind that my review will be hands-on and honest. You’ll just have to accept that my review will be posted even if it’s not a positive review for your product. Also note that products sent to me will not be returned unless you pay for the return shipping yourself. If you’re interested in me reviewing your product or website, please read my guidelines for getting reviewed first, and then feel free to contact me for further information/instructions (and/or a shipping address).

Will you link to my website?
It depends greatly on the website. If I find your website to be relevant and interesting, I’ll be happy to link to it (or a specific page/post/article) when the occasion arises. You may feel free to link to my website in return if you want to, but I’m not a fan of linking to a website simply because someone links to me (ie. mutual/reciprocal linking).

What else?
If you have further questions, go ahead and ask.