Sivert L. Nielsen 1973 - 2005
As many will know, the Textpattern community lost a great friend and asset when Sivert, otherwise known as sivni, succumbed to his illness and sadly took his own life on July 16th 2005. He had suffered from depression, which mainly took the form of panic attacks, for many years.
I first came across Sivert around August of 2004 when I was still using WordPress. He had done several styles for WordPress and as you know my own site specializes in templates for both WordPress and Textpattern. When I saw the light and moved to Textpattern myself, there he was, leading the way as it were. We continued to communicate by email over the months that followed, mostly quizzing each other’s knowledge with “how do you do this” or “is that possible”. We read each others blogs so I became aware of his illness. I was pleased when he took on the job of creating and running this site and of course, when he asked, I tested out things like registration, file uploads and article creation.
When Dean posted the sad news of his death I was totally shocked and could say very little about it at the time. Now that I am running this site I have to say I am proud to be following in his footsteps and hope that I can do a good job of it in his absence.
I have gone through all of Sivert’s styles that I have been able to get hold of and updated them to run with the current Textpattern release. You will find them in the sidebar over on the left.
I’m leaving comments open for those of you who might like to add anything of your own.