Dave Kellam

There are tons of weblogs around these days. A large chunk of them have commenting systems. If you read and comment on a number of sites regularly, you end up forgetting about most of them. There’s also no way to let your readers know what you’re reading. So, we need a way to track what we’ve posted elsewhere. Enter coComment and another way to use del.icio.us.

coComment

coComment is another one of the closed beta-du-jours, a site that aims to do it for you (and track popular conversations, vis-a-vis popular posts). You read a few of the comments (Solution Watch, Tech Crunch, Scoble) and it sounds like the second coming of sliced bread: it’s going to be “HUGGEEE!!”, everyone needs it, filling a void, it’s a simple idea that will work.

The idea isn’t really new, Kottke started doing something similar awhile ago. Flickr lets you keep track of photos you’ve commented on. coComment will just be another site I have to check on a daily basis. This isn’t a jab at coComment, so much as an attempt to outline my solution and point out an alternative that isn’t in closed beta. coComment will serve a different set of needs; doing things like aggregating the comments, offering notification and some community aspects.

All niceties aside, I will take a jab at any Web 2.0 company that uses tables for layout. Oh, and there’s something called spacer.gif? For shame.

@commented-on

I’ve been making an effort to participate more in conversations on other weblogs over the last few months, and can attest that they’re hard to keep track of. Zach told me he’d been using del.icio.us to keep track of his comments and pointed me towards two posts offering a few more details. Basically, it comes down to tagging anything you comment on with @commented-on (see mine).

Del.icio.us already has a number of ways to integrate itself into your site, os and browser. You can also tag whatever you want, although coComment seems to be doing a good job covering all the popular services. If you’re a del.icio.us user, the extension for firefox can make the posting process relatively painless.

It’s simple, works for me and keeps track of my comments.

No posts for a week and it appears the universe has not ground to a crashing halt. I fear my gravitation isn’t what is used to be. Am I no longer the center of existence? Hey, I’ve been working on some other projects, time for a quick run down. I’ll hit up the web project list first, covering Seal Club, flickrRSS updates and eightface notes, then it’ll procede into personal territory, mostly covering cleaning and vinyl.

Seal Club Updates

There’s been a minor redesign around Seal Club, so go check it. The impetus would be a decreased reliance on del.icio.us, the introduction of the blog and mailbag. The mailbag hasn’t been finished off, mostly due to a lack of mail. If you want your letter to appear in the first round, drop us a line and will rip your apart in public. The mission of the weblog isn’t clear at this point — it will mostly be used for site updates and as a platform to openly mock pillars of the design community.

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Stairway at St. Paul’s is probably the coolest music video that I’ve seen in a long long time. Jeroen Offerman spent three months learning to sing Stairway to Heaven backwards and recorded his performance on the steps of St. Paul for confused spectators.

This film comes via the first issue of Wholphin, a new DVD magazine by the folks at McSweeney’s. With a level of pretension that we’ve grown to expect, Jeroen’s contributions to the magazine are used as dvd menu items. It’ll come on eventually if you leave the DVD menu playing, it happened to Tavis and I while we were playing some Mario Kart DS. It was a weird experience.

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Now that Zeldman’s on board we can get past this icky Web 2.0 nonsense and move on to the next version.

As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?

Sounds good to me, but we should really stop dicking around. Unfortunately, Web Infinity sounds like a bad car name, so in true playground fashion we’ll go with Web Infinity Point Oh Plus One. We can even shorten it to Web iPopo for marketing and a nice conference namey feel.

What’s black and white and red all over? You guessed it, Fork for K2. And what is a K2 you ask? Other than the oft-neglected peak situated beside Everest? If you’re familiar with WordPress, K2 is the successor to Kubrick, the popular default theme. It aims to be a bit more than a standard theme, with out of the box support for a number of plugins and a slew of built-in options. You can download the latest K2 beta via Binary Bonsai.

Lots of people are running K2, it’s a decent option if you don’t want to get into the php/css guts of a WordPress theme. That said, the stock look might be getting you down. That’s where Fork comes in. You should be able to drop it into a default K2 install, enable it via the options panel and have a dirty greyscale theme without any real work. It should also offer a little bit of insight into the theme’s visual customization.

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This is Domino, our new cat. She’s seen here showing an affinity for boxes — emerging from a hiding place she’d been keen to get out of hours earlier. This is probably the first of many inevitable cat photos.

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Here we go with another visual roundup of the latest and greatest 5Q interviews from Seal Club. Five more sets of questions, featuring a good whack of talent that we abuse by probing the most mundane aspects of their existence. Go read them now (and check out the first five interviews if you missed ’em).

Thanks to: Paul B. Drohan, Khaled Abou Alfa, Dave Shea, Greg Storey and Matthew Good, for helping us out this time around. Hopefully, we’ll have more Seal Club action coming at you soon. It’s been slow over the last month or so.

Finally got around to updating the flickrRSS plugin for WordPress. I had been meaning to do it for awhile, but kept putting it off. Now that WordPress 2.0 is out, I figured it would be a good time to break the plugin. Yeah, that’s right break it. I changed around a bunch of the options and how the parameters are handled, so you’ll need to set it up again.

As an end user, you won’t notice a lot of the improvements. The interface makes more sense now (compare a 2.0 screenshot vs 3.0 screenshot) and should be easier to use. The options panel has been moved into Presentation, which makes more sense I think. At least that’s where I usually went looking for it. The image sizes now reflect the actual flicker image sizes too.

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Hello 2006. Bring it.

I won’t get into a huge retrospective, but the past year has been pretty damn good. Some highlights: moving to WordPress, graduating from Teacher’s College, the popularity of the flickrRSS and myStatus plugins, having site designs appear on a number of CSS Gallery sites, Alanah moving in and receiving a Digital Rebel for Christmas.

As they say, the new year is a time for growth and rejuvenation (but I could be wrong, maybe it’s Spring they’re talking about). In the spirit of growing, it’s time to rip the site apart and start again. If you’re new to the neighbourhood, it happens a lot.

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I created a little page awhile ago that allows you to retrieve your Flickr userid number or groupid number. It actually gets used — mostly for WordPress plugins, but you can also use it for other things like embedding Flash slideshows in your site. I’ve moved the page to idGettr.com and created a Flickeresque design for it.

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Creating your own trippy nebulous desktop wallpaper is relatively easy. The only tool you need is a painting program capable of drawing gradients and maintaining multiple layers (Photoshop, PaintShop or Gimp all fit the bill nicely).

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