Erik Nilsson | chaff |

erik nilsson

chaff

Current iPod Heavy Rotation

The Raconteurs Consolers of the Lonely
Loud and delicate. Messy, dangerous, and strangely compelling, like the sickbed of a beautiful girl.

Gnarls Barkley The Odd Couple
A Eurythmics for the 00s: brilliant vocals over catchy yet unexpected sounds.

Four Tet Ringer
An EP of pleasant electronica. Type to it, dance to it, or listen to it in the elevator of a space station orbiting a distant, dying sun.

Flunk Morning Star
Fragile diva over meticulously hand-crafted pop. Flunk earns an A+. Too bad they enrolled pass/fail.

Smoosh Free to Stay
Good pop.

Cut Chemist, The Audience's Listening
Chemistry class is in session.

Kraftwerk, Tour de France
Spin it.

Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
This is what The Streets could be like if The Streets' music wasn't shite. Could be very big with fans of Sheffield culture.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs Gold Lion EP
Punky New York pop anthem, from the formerly hot new New York punky pop flavor. Ignore the apostates, this is a lot better than Fever to Tell. Can't wait to see some bones. Postscript: ehh... didn't really need to see those bones.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Howl
Heartfelt pop mostly based around acoustic guitars. Dunno what this has to do with black motorcycles.

Blue Scholars, Blue Scholars
Edified hip hop from the 206.

Kraftwerk, Minimum-Maximum
Love songs to highways and bicycle races peformed live by the total studio band.

Thievery Corporation, Babylon Rewound
Dub remixes of the crime of the century.

Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
The opening riff will stick in your head. You will catch yourself trying to hum it at the strangest times. Over-the-top and beyond, this album is S-K's Physical Graffiti.

Gorillaz, Demon Days
Hey, hey, they're the Gorillaz, and they are the greast band ever that never was.

Youssou N'Dour, Egypt
Senegalese sensation Youssou N'Dour sings a love song to his musical roots.

Lists

Lists are a great way to create the illusion of purposeful structure where none exists. Allow me to demonstrate.

Top 5 most gratifying things to do on a bike

5. Ride hard and long, the body a device to power and direct the bike, the bike a device to carry the body.
4. Pass a car.
3. Big huck. (Only on a mountain bike. Huck is seldom fun on a road bike.)
2. Pass a pack of fit guys half my age riding hard, in pretty bike clothes on fancy bikes. While I'm pulling a trailer with a small boy in it. Pass them like they are standing still. "Keep at it kids, you'll get faster."
1. Just riding. Really, it's all about riding.

Seven habits of effective web sites

7. Don't use gratuitous Flash. Especially, not for the home page. Waiting for a flash site to load is like standing in line to watch TV. Even after loading, Flash sites are slower. If you are going to have an HTML option, you will have to develop two web sites. If you require Flash, you will lose visitors. In any case, you will lose visitors who won't wait around for slow flash to load. Flash is a good way to accomplish video, but effective web sites start loading flash after a page is already mostly loaded and functional. What do you hope to gain with Flash?
6. Make your img files no bigger than they need to be to look good. This is your best chance to make your site faster. Use the best file format for the type of image, usually JPEG for photos and GIF for most other things. Re-use img files wherever practical.
Don't use images for text, without a very good reason. Text in images slows your site down, makes the site look ugly when it's first loading, and makes the site hard to index. Take, for example, the menus on this site. It's all done with text, so it's super fast. Also, it still works fine with JavaScript disabled, without having to resort to noscript tags.
5. Cache img files. All you have to do is force the user's browser to request the file. Any modern browser will do the rest. It is specifically not necessary to keep all of the images in JavaScript memory. I know all of the books say to do this, but they're wrong. Just get the img down to the visitor's computer. The browser is going to manage that image faster and more efficiently than you can in JavaScript. For an example, see the home page of this site.
4. Make it good the first time. The initial user experience is usually most critical, so be sure it's good. In particular, make sure it's fast. Very often, people will make a site they think is pretty zippy, because they are visiting it for the nth time, and everything is already cached. Of course the site looks fast! To measure the first-time experience, wipe your cache first, then visit your site from a remote network. That's closer to what the first-time visitor will see.
3. Test your site. Using automatic or manual means, make sure your links are not broken and the site works. External links must be re-tested periodically. Even for small sites, test on multiple browsers, at least IE and FF.
2. Design for change. How many minutes will it take you to change the home page? How many to add a press release? Most important web sites have frequent, small changes.
1. Have interesting content. Don't even bother until you have something worth saying. Read what you wrote and fix it. Spell check. If you can't write well, find a good writer to do the writing part.