Lauhakari.com - the online portfolio of webdeveloper Mikko Lauhakari

Wow, time really flies, right!
I moved here to Helsinki a year and a month ago, but feels like it was, well a little shorter than that. My Helsinki adventure started a bit slow, with work being hard to find. Actually in the beginning I did get some interviews but then it died of. Hade some freelance projects and the “dream” (read: will) of having my own company grew stronger and stronger.
I started looking into how to start one here in Finland, options, economic help, taxes and so on and so on. In the end of April I then finally filed the papers and May 1st was the start date of Divajn – Creative Studio. Got the papers back in the end May end from May 21:st or 22:nd the business was official and legit.

Business has been somewhat slow so far, mostly been working on my own projects, now owned by the company (?). And also it’s summertime so people are on vacation.
Have a few offers out which will be decided upon in the beginning of August, so cross your fingers…

With the changes that have happened and business that’s been started, this page will begin a slight transformation soon. It will change from my personal freelance portfolio site to just being my personal site, with some portfolio stuff. Hopefully, time accepting, more frequent posts and also on more topics than just web-development, I’d like to include more of my interest here too to tell you all about all the cool stuff.

So I welcome you all to divajns website at http://divajn.eu and all future work request and suggestions I prefer if you send them through there THANX!
And for this site, you can look forward to more interesting stuff in the near future.

I wrote a small introduction and guide to creating custom post types in the upcoming WordPress 3.0.
If your swedish is somewhat okey, you can read the article over at my swedish blog or try the google translated version (the grammar sucks but hey).

You read about all the new stuff in WordPress 3.0 in the WP codex .

So for the past few months I’ve been at work with a new site for finnish photographer Kalle Kataila.

Kalle as described at his own, newly released website
Kalle Kataila (b.1978 Helsinki) is an artist currently based in Helsinki, Finland. Kataila’s work is based around concepts of landscape, awareness and personal stories. He has exhibited with artists from The Helsinki School at Paris Photo, Art Forum Berlin, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris and the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. Kataila’s works are in art collections at the Helsinki City Art Museum and the Finnish State Art Gallery as well as in several private and corporate collections in Europe and in the United States.

The site has what you call a minimalistic design, with no more information than the essentials. As K.Kataila himself is an artist, designer, the layout and design of the site largely created by himself. I took more of a consultant role in that area, and then made it all happen with html and css. Everything, more or less, standards based or rather W3C validated (as I’m writing this there are some underlying dusting to do, no worries, nothing you can see )

Other than Html/CSS the inside workings of the site are handled by PHP and a MySql database. To my aid I used the fantastic CakePhp framework, which has a lot of built in functionality one take advantage of to build applications/websites faster.

I’m not going to go into more detail about Cake here now, I will do a longer post at the swedish blog, feel free to surf over and read it there in a day or two (use google translate if needed.)

So, check out Kalle Katailas new site and do leave a comment  on what ever!

Unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I am not an Apple fanboy. Actually I’m more of a Microsoft fan-boy, allthough not really that either, but more so than apple. So it’s not surprising I’m looking forward to Microsofts keynote at MWC2010 in Barcelona where they will reveal the new Windows Phone 7 series.

Well, after that presentation… I WANT ONE!!!

As you all may know, a hug earthquake hit Haiti a few days ago and thousands of people have been killed or lost their homes. In wake of the catastrophe many idiots for people have started fake donation sites and services to cash in on the people in Haiti.

If you’d like to contribute and help please visit Yele.com, a grassroots movement started by my great favorites, Wyclef Jean to aid Haitians. Yele needs your help now more than ever, so click the link below and please help Haiti and it’s people!!!

Yes, well, I was away to Stockholm the past 2 days and off course I had problems with my mail and the contact-form on the site. All is fixed and good now, but if you did send me a message through the form Monday or Tuesday, there is unfortunately a big chance I did not receive it.

So I’m sorry if I didn’t  answer you, but please do send me a new message and I will get back to you =)

---

Siis, olin Tukholmassa viimeiset 2 päivää ja tietenkin minulle tuli ongelmia e-postin ja contact-formin kanssa. Kaikki on ok ja toimii taas, mutta jos olet lähettänyt minulle postia lomakkeen kautta maanantaina tai tiistaina, on valitettavasti suuri mahdollisuus että en ole saanut sitä.

Joten olen pahoillani jos en vastaa sinulle, mutta lähetä minulle uusi viesti ja vastaan teille pian! =)

I just completed this years survey over at A List Apart.

Every year they do a survey for people who work with making websites to check up on what we know, trends, work situation and so on and so on. So if your a student or working with web related stuff in any way, head over and take the survey!

I don’t know if this has been around for awhile or not, haven’t logged into Webmaster Tools for some time.
But anyways I just noticed a ‘new’ link in the Google Webmaster Tools menu, Labs. If you click on Labs to open the sub menu you’ll get three options, the first being “Fetch as Googlebot“.
Fill in the url of the page you want to check and within a minute you’ll receive the page just as Googlebot sees it.

Aaaaaah, so I finally finished the new site, allthough not totally 100%. Still have some information to fill out about the different projects and jobs I’ve done.

But I’m really really happy with the new look. Even though I did like the old one, and tried to to make a new version of but then found other inspirations and so it is now a lot brighter and fresher !

The site now rests comfortably on WordPress, which I’m loving more and more to work with. Initially i was going to code the theme by myself from scratch, but while browsing for inspiration and tips I  got stuck for a theme from Arcsin I really fell for. So, instead of re-inventing the wheel, I decided to modify the ‘simple-organisation‘-theme found on his site.

I’ll propably release my version of the theme to all you in due time, still have some tiny quirks I will fix, tune and change. You know how it is, you’re never done :s I tried to add some subtle designs elements that you might not notice at first, but makes the experience a lot nicer.

I did not go the HTML 5 route, not yet, but I did use some CSS3 elements, like border-radius for rounded corners. All of you Using IE, the site will be just a tiny bit less appealing for you, Sorry! Haven’t used that much javascript either, allthough got some ideas for things I want to incorporate in the near future. And off course, what more perfect place to try stuff out than ones own site.

I’m hoping to keep the blog alive and kicking now with the new site and wordpress. I still have the swedish blog left and as that was going to be my main focus for blogging about web related stuff, because there are so many english already, you should add it to your reader also (yes I’m on a mighty self promotion journey here).

Well I’d love some comments on the new site and/or any bugs you find, yes yes there might some. It’s my own site not a clients , no worries *eeeehm*

Yees, I have completed the first version of my first Adobe AIR application ever. You could say it’s in an alpha/beta stage. It can be run but there is some functionality that is not implemented yet.

It is so far a simple feed reader, which announces when there are new posts. It checks with specied intervals if there are new entries, if so, it plays a sound and shows an alert box, and the windows gets focus (if it is minimized).
Features that are coming include, saving the feeds, follow multiple feeds simultaneously and choose the update speed.
(and also a brand new Design!)

Well, want to try it – get it!