About a month ago, when I had absolutely nothing to challenge my brain with except thinking about life, I made the above image. I was thinking about how people always seem to blame other things than themselves. That particular day I tried to write down what my friends blamed for various unfortunate happenings in their lives, quite a bit of fun actually. I encourage everyone to think about it a little extra after reading this blog post.

Anyway, once I had a small list I wrote a little note, used my scanner and then published it to the web. What I didn’t realize was that so many of you nice visitors would come to my site to see it, about 35 000. For me and my website at least, that is an immense number and I was really exited about it. The next day I received an interesting email from my host saying: You’re currently using up plenty of our resources for your site. Ejoh has a massive CPU-usage per user.

That is the main reason for me switching to this new layout, almost without images. It is a pre-made template but since I haven’t got the time to fix something else immediately it’ll have to do for now.

I’d love to hear what you think of the image. Have a nice day!

Running a big community web site with lots of users is like skating on very thin slippery ice. I have very little experience from doing that but I recently saw a big Swedish site perish under its furious users. The site, Bilddagboken, is a image uploading tool which allows you to view your images to other people much like Flickr and also comes with a diary for every user. Yesterday they decided to publish a set of new features along with a new fresh design.

Unfortunately for them the design loaded very slow in the beginning, for various reasons, and the users weren’t happy. Although the new style was far more pleasant to the eye than the old one they decided they didn’t like it. Probably because so much had changed that it was impossible to navigate through the site when you had learned another way to do it.

So, how do you launch a new design and keep your user base pleased?

1. Don’t change too much
   Your users don’t want to have to look for the features on your site on other places than where they expect them to be.
2. Test
   Never launch a design on a community site which has not been tested thoroughly. Your visitors will kill you if things don’t work the way they’re expected to.
3. Keep things simple
   Before doing extreme, futuristic design, you should make sure you have something simple that really works and is well thought through.

I am sure you could have figured out these three simple things on your own but it seems some big sites have not.

These three clips come from a very good Swedish comedy called Kopps. Kopps is a deliberate misspelling of Cops if you didn’t get that. Anyway, the movie is about a police district in Sweden that the Police Chief has decided should be removed because of its low efficiency. The local cops aren’t very excited about it, which is understandable, and they start doing stupid things to make him change his mind. The clips feature one of the more violent cops and I think you’ll enjoy them. At least I hope so.

The videos can be seen here: http://ejoh.zmolklife.com/fs/kopps.html

Unfortunately the rest of the movie is in Swedish.

DEAR RECEIVER, You have just received a Norwegian virus. Since we are not so technologically advanced in Norway, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all the files on your hard disk yourself and send this mail to everyone you know. Thank you very much for helping me.

//Ole Hacker

As you probably have guessed I followed Ole’s instructions…

 

Recently I was inspired to do art with a camouflage theme. Above painting was made mainly for testing purposes. I wanted to see what people look for and how they scan the picture the first time they see it. In my opinion the snake is a little misplaced and not camouflaged well enough…

…anyway, I’d like to hear what you think about it.

I have also made a drawing for a friend, a girl. Apparently she thought I had the skills to make a picture to her moms birthday. Since I love being nice I didn’t accept any money from her. Well, now that I think about it, she never offered me any payment. Ohh shit, I think she played me. There is something about her eyes that I seem to be unable to resist.

I thought I should share what projects I have been working on with you. Like always I have had a few very odd ideas and some of them have actuallybeen quite successfull.

ejoh/fs - I have started up this small site mostly for testing purposes.I have investigated what it takes to get huge traffic to your website, what people like etcetera. The articles and the layout have been designed to be fastloading, something that people apparently like very much.

ejoh link archive - This is a link archive for web developers. It is designed to be very unorganized and “random” in its appearance. Notice that this archive is not yet finished.

I have some more interesting things coming up ;).

 

This might strike you as a bit odd because I have engaged in poetry. Yea, that’s right. Poetry. I have made a translation of a nice Swedish poem. It’s a parody on a very beautiful poem by Viktor Rydberg that’s called The Tomten.

Anyway, this parody is inspired by the rhyme Ten Little Indians which I am sure you have heard of. I took the time to make some illustrations for the text. I hope you’ll enjoy them. (more…)

 

I recently ended up in a discussion over at Snark forums about feminism. Snark is a forum with lots of girls. It goes about 8 girls on each guy, so you can understand I had a tough time when I started criticizing feminism openly. I have now realized that starting that discussion was a big mistake. I should have known better.

Some persons had a hard time understanding what exactly I didn’t like about feminism so I thought I should explain my opinions in this blog post. (more…)

The worlds largest computer festival and LAN party, Dreamhack, starts off today. It is a huge event which will draw approximately 15 000 visitors which will bring around 8 300 computers. The festival is held in Jönköping, Sweden, this weekend and is almost the biggest event in Sweden, all categories.

Dreamhack started off 12 years ago in the city Malung with only thirty participants and now the event has grown so much people from outside Sweden come visit it. I am currently living in Jönköping and thinks this is great. Lots of people discover our city and we become internationally know. I am not going to Dreamhack though, mostly because I don’t play computer games. I have other reasons too which you will read about further down. (more…)

I spend about five to ten minutes on Digg every day looking for new interesting stories about web design and tech related news. I’m not a dedicated Digg fan, I mean it’s not like Reddit, Dzone or DesignFloat, but I find interesting things there from time to time. One major difference between Digg and Reddit is for example that more bloggers get featured on the front page at Digg. That could be a good thing, not just getting articles from big established sites. In most cases though, that is a bad thing. You’ll soon understand why. (more…)