Profiles

Around 2003 i started my first blog. It was about me and my life. Very original. Actually, it was more of a learning playground. How to make themes, how to do this and that. Remember, i’m a graphic designer and illustrator and not into code. However, i remember the words from my old teacher at Design school ”It’s not the tools, it’s your creativity”. Some of my classmates misunderstood him. They thought that they could just be creative and let somebody else take care of the ”dirty work”.

But knowing your tools is a way to release your creativity in every way you could think of. Just ask a designer or artist working with paint, wood and so on.

So i wanted to learn so much i could. At the time i was using Movable Type (MT). For those who remember, MT was the blogging software most people used. I was also looking at b2 cafelog, the mother/father of WordPress. But i stayed with MT. Later i heard of a b2 cafelog fork called WordPress. I don’t know, but the name ”WordPress” was stuck in my head for weeks. Then i downloaded WordPress 1.0 codenamed ”Davis”. This was in the beginning of 2004. It was a rough transition from MT. Most of the things was much harder with WordPress. Creating themes was impossible for me. I didn’t get it. But as the time went by, new versions with new functionality was released. And more and more users migrated from MT to WP. The community was growing and was more active.

GPL was something i never heard of back then. MT was a commercial blogging software, but WP was not. It was the first time i could see how effective WordPress using the open source model was. Everyone could join in. It was a time when developers could be legends, and i watched it all. A GPL version of MT was later released but then it was too late. WordPress was king of the hill.

In 2004 me, my brother and a friend of ours started a food blog (in swedish) running WordPress which i designed a theme for. It was the first time i did something like this with WordPress. It was featured in Smashing Magazine a couple of times, and i was getting business offers from here and there. And in 2005 we started the Swedish Food Blog Awards (still running), and was getting our first media attention in Swedish newspapers. All this was made possible because of WordPress.

Today i don’t use WP that much, but still have WP to thank for a lot’s of things.