The Publication

Valhalla Island is a long-running weblog written by Jim Whimpey, out of Queensland, Australia. It started as a learning exercise but has become a thing I love.

I see myself as an editor, writer and commentator. VI is a filter for the massive amount of stuff I see and read every day. I’m using my taste as a filter and I want to share things that I find great. I write about what I’m interested in or areas where I think I have original thought. I try to bring a level of craft to what I do.

The Archives, browsable by month. Search is available at the bottom of the page but if you’re serious about your searching use this Google term followed by your query.

The fantastic, free and open source Wordpress has run Valhalla Island since the beginning. It’s hosted at Segment Publishing. Markdown makes writing for HTML completely painless.

My Favourite Posts

If you’re a new visitor here’s a few of my favourite posts to give you an idea of whether you’ll like it here.

Design & Manner

Valhalla Island is designed, marked up and styled in house, by me.

My objective is to simplify. To make the words I’ve written the sole focus of attention. Too many websites have too much bullshit that doesn’t matter. There’s too many ads, too many irrelevant links, too many widgets, images, comments, hosting affiliations, sister sites, plugins, forms and chrome.

The content area in VI is styled elastically. It means the layout stretches with the text size when it’s increased or decreased. Relative spacing and widths are kept in line with text size making for great readability at any size. Try it now with ⌘+ and ⌘- (or ctrl+ and ctrl-).

This latest version has seen the removal of comments completely from the site. They weren’t adding anything of value and were just creating noise. You can always email me your thoughts.

The Producer

Me and My Friend Benny

I’m a 21-year-old, recent graduate of Multimedia at Griffith University and that’s me on the right. I work as a web developer in various situations. I love sport, swimming, bike riding, reading, my beautiful girlfriend Kristin and trying to make things better. My Flickr stream and Twitter profile are maintained consistently. Other stuff I do online can be found at ClaimID.

Workspace

When you spend so much time in one place, interacting with the things in one area, you have to care about it. This is the place where just about everything published on Valhalla Island originates.

My Office

Hardware

  • One 24″ 2.4ghz Core2Duo iMac
  • One 12″ 1.5ghz G4 Powerbook
  • The Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet

Desktop Software

Server Software

Thanks for visiting.