Besides creating driver websites I also run a small news site over at norsk-racing.com. It’s been slightly neglected from time to time, but I’m currently working on a major overhaul. The new site will feature user registration and the possibility for drivers to publish their own press releases as well as blog about their racing. It might be a waste of time, but I have to give it a go, as I really want to do what I can to promote Norway’s racing talents.

Finally I present you a list of the racing related websites I’ve made over the years (in alphabetical order):

Atle Gulbrandsen
Harald Hellum Racing
Kim Kristian Humborstad
Norges Bilsportforbund
Norsk-Racing.com
Olrud Mobil 1 Racing
Petter Granlund
Roger Moen Motorsport
Stian Paulsen
Stian Sørlie
Tomas Eidjord

UltraLight is just that. A super clean, ultra lightweight theme, with valid xhtml markup and css. It’s stripped of all unessecery code and apart from a background image it’s got no graphics whatsoever. Allthough I made it for my own personal use, I’ve decided to share it as it would be a good platform for most theme designers and deverlopers. And as it’s a fully working theme with widget support, it’s also a sweet theme for any blogger who wants a clean, lightweight design on their blog.

See the theme in action and download for free over at ultralight.fredriksoerlie.com.

It’s actually been a while now since Stian Paulsen dropped by with my helmet, all dressed up in my own design. As usual he did an amazing job, recreating my rather strict design to perfection. Thanks a lot, Stian. Looking forward to launching a new website for you soon :)

Here’s the “sketch” I gave Stian to work from. He added a couple of shadow effects as well, giving the helmet that final touch.

I remember watching the older go-kart racers using GP2’s back in the early 90’s. They where so cool! Not that I didn’t have cool helmets myself. Back then I had a Simpson Bandit 5 and later a custom painted Simpson Super Shark. They where both badass, and I still love them to death. Still, never having owned an Arai has kind of bugged me – until today…

As with most wannabe/has-been racers, my personal helmet is the only thing that sets me apart from most trackday racers these days. It’s a statement that I used to be a “real” racingdriver. A reminder that I used to be serious about the sport and had ambitions. Allthough my long gone dreams of becoming a F1 driver never came through, at least I have my own helmet design!

Back in 1996 I got the Super Shark painted with my own design for the first time, and boy did it look awsome! I made the design myself, with pointers from automotive photographer Erik Nordlien. The helmet was painted by a guy in the UK who apparantly used to paint Johnny Herbert’s helmets. And he did a very good job with it, choosing nice colors and effects for the time.

10 years later my trusted old Super Shark had been through a lot, and paint had chipped several places. As I couldn’t afford a proper new helmet at the time, I decided to repaint it. Together with helmet painting guru Stian Paulsen, I did some major changes to the design, incorporating a lot of silver. The design turned out pretty cool, but the distinct features of my old design got a bit lost in the process. I just seem to prefer the old school helmet style with simple colors and design.

So my new Arai will get an updated version of my original design. Black and grey will replace some of the blue colors, and the red will become more orange. Just to make it stand out a bit more. But this time I will make sure that the white areas are kept clean, so that the distinct diagonal line at the front and the “F” on the side stay as visible as possible. It will be a high contrast, classic design and one that is truly my own.

Here are the plugins that power my site:

• Advanced Excerpt
  Several improvements over WP’s default excerpt. The size of the excerpt can be limited using character or word count, and HTML markup is not removed.
• Akismet
  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• Category Selector Back to the Sidebar (MOD)
  Puts the category selector section back to the sidebar of the Post page.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
• Last.Fm Records
  The Last.Fm Records plugin lets you show what you are listening to, with a little help from our friends at last.fm.
• Lightbox 2
  Used to overlay images on the current page.
• PictureGrid
  Picturegrid – Add flickr to your blog, no mess, no fuss.
• PJW Page Excerpt
  Allows you to edit excerpts for Pages.
• Post-Plugin Library
  Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.
• Post Thumb Revisited
  Thumbnails images from your posts. Useful for listing popular posts, post list, etc.
• Recent Comments
  Displays a highly configurable list of the most recent comments.
• Reveal IDs for WP Admin
  Reveals hidden IDs in Admin interface that have been removed with WordPress 2.5 (formerly known as Entry IDs in Manage Posts/Pages View for WP 2.5).
• Sociable
  Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
• Twitter for Wordpress
  Displays your public Twitter messages for all to read.
• WP-DBManager
  Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.
• WP Super Cache
  Very fast caching module for WordPress.

There are still a few features left before the site is complete, so don’t worry if it doesn’t behave as expected. It soon will :)

Fredrik