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About Erik
Erik Nilsson is primarily composed of water. Right now, he is at approximately 37 °C. He curates a multi-trillion copy collection of the human genome, almost every one of which he personally assembled. His sense of humor runs to the dry and wicked. His wheels are true and his chain is well lubricated.
Erik Nilsson does not play piano. Not well, anyway. He doesn't speak Swedish all that well either. For more uninteresting minutiae on Erik Nilsson, feel free to consult his vanity web site. It's pretty, but crippled by the inherent limitations of the subject.
About This web site
When I made the first version of this site in 1999, I wrote it in HTML, using a text editor. Later, I learned website development tools like Dreamweaver and Frontpage. When I created a new version of this web site, the choice was obvious: HTML in a text editor. Six years later, I am once again typing HTML into a text editor. I maintain about half a dozen web sites now, so I do use a database to keep track of all the pieces, and I use database queries quite a bit to keep from typing the same bits over and over. But every bit of HTML starts out as HTML. The result is, frankly, fast and reliable. Web tools are generally hard to use and produce junky, slow HTML. Last time I looked, none of the tools did a plausible job of image caching.
It's not that a decent website editor couldn't be made. If it existed, I'd be willing to pay thousands of dollars for it. But while I wait, HTML is really quite easy. The only hard part is dealing with conflicting bugs in different browsers, but even this issue isn't too bad if you are willing to accept slight differences in behavior between browsers.
Writing a web site about one person is easy for other reasons too, of course. The inherent limitations of the subject matter insulate one from the temptation to make things more complicated than they need to be. Also, it is not necessary to reconcile a wide variety of conflicting objectives.
By the way, the web started out with an ideology, in opposition to several thousand years of accumulated expertise in typography and calligraphy. The ideology held that high quality media could somehow be produced by skipping the design process. Consequently, fonts, sizes, colors, and almost all other important design decisions were left to the whim of browser programmers, or dumped in the reader's lap. One of the great joys of my adult life has been to experience the meticulous crushing of this ideology into dust.
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Shout-outs
Web Bloopers and GUI Bloopers by Jeff Johnson, About Face by Alan Cooper, Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte. HTML by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy. Dynamic HTML by Danny Goodman. Aki Namioka rocks the known world.
Picture Credits
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