Dave Kellam

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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Today, in the spirit of giving, I bought myself two new books. Umm yeah the giving — they’ll help me give back to the community. My fiction consumption has been pretty dismal this year; I have a list of books a mile long to read and don’t need anymore of them. So, the day’s purchases included reference books of sorts: the Zen of CSS design by Dave Shea and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm. I’ll call them textbooks for the real world.

Web design books aren’t something I usually spend money on. I’m no expert, but a lot of the design books that I’ve flipped through seemed like they’d been written by a semi-literate twelve year-old who had discovered the view source button in Dreamweaver. I’m not talking about hardcore tech reference books (see O’Reilly’s, I’ve picked those up before), but the books that help you build a decent looking site. I haven’t gotten into CSS Zen or Web Standards yet, but I figured I’d write about them now, as there will probably never be a proper review. I can’t see myself actually finishing them, they’re more likely to become dog-earred natural extensions of my desk.

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