Dave Kellam

I’ve been working on a number of web-based projects lately, some that pay, some that don’t. At this moment, I’d like to officially announce one of those projects: Seal Club, a small art and design group. It’s not an agency or anything like that, just a few people that like to make pretty pictures. Really, it’s been operating for a few weeks now but we haven’t been promoting it. There have been some hints around here, namely the Conform Project domain redirecting to Seal Club and the del.icio.us feed in my links.

The site is essentially an old-school ftp-style design site, glued together with a bunch of new tools. We all used to be members of art groups in the pre-y2k web (Swanky, Suffocate) and have some desire to relive those days. Mostly, it’s the motivation of having other people to kick you in the ass when you’re not getting anything done. Everything is done by hand via ftp with some efforts to stay standards compliant. We use del.icio.us to help us maintain our lists or links within the site and the forum is powered by flickr.

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WordPress.com is one of the latest entries into the field of hosted weblogs. I signed up for an invite awhile ago and received one sometime last week. My site over there probably won’t see too much action, but it’s useful for testing purposes.

Right now, the service lacks somewhat in customizability (mostly on the appearance front) but it does offer a preview of what WordPress 1.6 will have to offer on the administration side of things. It’s also an example of the WordPressMU (multiuser) install, although most people probably don’t care too much about that.

I have an invitation to the service to give away, figured may as well offer it up here. If you’re interested, just drop me a comment and let me know why it should be yours. I’d rather give it to someone who actually wants to start their own weblog or migrate from blogspot instead of someone who’ll use it sporadically like me.

Hey boys and girls. Time to rip the site apart and redesign it. I’m talking pull the guts out and start again. The current layout is an evolution of an evolution of some metaphorical layered object. Actually, it’s based on a version of Kubrick from around December last year when I first installed WordPress. There’s a lot of legacy, there’s a lot of mess. I’ve been putting it off for awhile and may as well do it now.

If you were an adventurous soul that actually looked under the hood, I commend you. I have trouble keeping track of what I’ve done. Someone asked me about releasing this layout as a theme. After I get the new layout up and finish up some client work, I’ll try to clean up the style sheet and pags and release some semblence of a theme for WordPress.

I’ve been frustrated with the format of my own website. I need to make some bits of information more prevalent. The layout of the site will likely go towards something like one main entry and five quick posts on the main page, with a footer highlighting other content on the site. That footer would like appear in some shape or form on all pages.

Anyway, it’s going to be a live work in progress. Things might not work particularly well in the next few days. We’ll get through it. I’ll try to keep track of some updates in the Change Log.

Update: Templates are stripped down for the most part, working on structure and basic layout of the site right now. As far as design goes, I haven’t started anything in photoshop, so that will be coming later (11:22pm EST).

Update 2: I’m getting there, header graphic is up now. Still a bit of old code to clean up. Have the comments to work on and start delving into some of the sub-pages. (Sep 27 – 1:45am EST)

It doesn’t matter if you’re running a high-school yearbook, a indie zine, a campus humour newspaper or a national rag, you turn to your friends for help and stories. Omar and I did the CompSci thing at Queen’s, but neither of us was particularily enamored with the corporate culture that everyone seemed to be pimping. Now, he’s writing for Globe, I got a teaching degree and he’s decided to write an article about it.

The gist of the article is there were a lot of tech jobs, so a lot of people went into computer science. Then the tech industry blew up and there weren’t any jobs left. But the industry is bumpin’ again, and they can’t get monkeys to do the crap jobs.

The article is partially targetted at getting people interested in Computer Science again. However, the problem isn’t just a lack of enrollment at the university level, the roots go much deeper. Enrollment is down across the board, high-schools are dropping computer courses like rocks due to lack of interest, translating into very few teaching jobs for someone marketing themselves purely as a CS teacher.

Personally, I feel that a lot of the problems lie in the disconnect between the curriculum and how students actually use computers. The curriculum is very business and/or programming oriented, there isn’t a huge focus on the internet beyond research purposes. These kids use the internet for everything and have been using these machines for most of their lives. Telling to type up a form letter in Word excites them about as much as a fat man in a speedo.

That said, the internet creates a massive level of freak-out on the part of admistrators. “We can’t give these kids unrestricted access, they’ll be downloading bomb recipes, porno and rap-music.” Honestly, they’ll be doing that anyway and will end up more inclined to do so. Throwing up a big barrier just makes kids want to get around it. Besides, we all know there’s always a way to get around the human element of software configuration.

What can we do to get kids interested again? Teach them interesting stuff. And that goes for all levels. You can teach a 6 year-old to program, you can trust a teenager to build a website and you can actually teach something useful to university students.

Theory is great. Math is great. So are algorithms and logic and everything else that they teach us over the course of a CS degree. But where are the scripting languages? Where are the database-driven web applications? Where are the make files? Where are my CSS and web-standards? We don’t need ’em all but it would be nice to have an introduction to some of these things. I knew people in their third or four year that didn’t know how to ftp/telnet into the lab server so they didn’t actually have to walk over to submit programs.

Anyway, I thought Omar’s article was going to be a bit more along the lines of, “People don’t want to work for the man” and less, “Hay guys! We need worker-bees”, which might help this quote make more sense:

“I see no need to get myself stuck in a grey box somewhere pounding out code that may or may not be used inside some whale of an application,” Mr. Kellam says.

It’s not so much that I don’t want a tech job, more that I’d rather spend time freelancing or on my own company than being an under-appreciated, underpaid codemonkey. Anyway, it got my name, picture and wonderful work ethic into a national newspaper, so I’m not complaining.

I don’t know what the Globe archiving policy is like, so here’s a pdf copy of the article:

PDF: Where jobs are and students aren’t (online)

JPG: Where jobs are and students aren’t (print)

A few people have been asking about how I style the images in the sidebar and I’ve been lazy in replying. Basically, we just need a list of images and then apply a few css style to it.

For the flickrRSS crowd, go into the options panel and set before image to <li> and after image to </li>. In your sidebar code/template/whatever wrap your flickrRSS function in a list. We also want to add a <div> so we can style the list. It will end up looking something like this:

That’s it on the html front. It’s the styling that’s left. There are two essential things that we want to do, remove the bullets and remove the breaks. These two bits of css should take care of that:

Everything beyond that is gravy. Personally, I take all the margins and padding off the list and then style the images with a thing border and a bit of padding. My code looks something along the lines of:

That’s pretty much it. You could start doing fancy things like backgrounds, fading the picture on hover, etc. But we’ll leave that as an exercise in Google research. There may be better ways to do it, you’re welcome to comment.

Caught the Kid Koala show at the Elixir last night. He’s pretty sick. You watch him standing up there mixing, he’ll put something on, smile to himself and turn around to grab something else. Thirty seconds later you know why he’s smiling. It’s the bits of Radiohead or Monty Python’s Holy Grail or whatever.

My camera was being a bit flakey, but I grabbed a few decent photos. I also caught a bit of video footage of him doing his trumpet thing, it’s about 24 seconds long. Here it is for download:

Microsoft has introduced Gadgets, their forray into the world of desktop widgets. I’m not claiming that Apple has the most original thing in the world going with the Dashboard (see Konfabulator) but at least they both call them widgets. For some reason, Microsoft has chosen a name that is 70% similar but not quite the same.

I’ll give them the sidebar, I saw it demoed for my HCI class years ago and thought it was pretty cool. But they ditched it part way through Longhorn. This is called putting widgets into the OS and dressing them up with research that they’ve already done.

Also, start.com is kind of weird. Microsoft has added this statement at the bottom for clarity:

This site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.

An incubation experiment! Pod people! Yea. There’s also an Office 12 demo video, it’s over 400mb for the cautious.

I decided to buy Mint for eightface in the wee hours of the morning last night. It’s been out for awhile now, so I’m sure the post title is clever and original. For those living under rocks or those who don’t care about websites, it’s essentially a statistics package that allows you to see who is visiting your site.

Dreamhost includes Analog on all hosted domains, so it’s easy enough to get a rough daily statistics breakdown. It might not be enough, depends what your needs are though — the scope of analog is fairly broad and it’s a little on the cryptic side but it suits most people fine. If you’re one of the new-age blog freaks that lives on the 0-day edge and lusts after technorati and the like, Mint is right up your alley.

Like most web-apps these days, Mint is extensible with a plugin and api structure. If you offer up any files on your site, it’s probably worth getting the Pepper plugin download counter, which does pretty much what it says. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, check out the Pepper forum for more.

I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a number of different web projects and helping people move, so this site has been neglected a little bit. At some point, I need to clean up my mess of a stylesheet. I’ve also been meaning to overhaul flickrRSS for awhile. Hopefully, it’ll come up in the next little while. Marc has been messing around with the flickr api, it’s provided some inspiration to redo my plugin. Ideally, it needs to stay really simple — flickrRSS just works for most people as a simple badge.

I’ve also realized that it’s September. I don’t know how that happened or when summer disappeared. Regardless, I’ve been trying to enjoy the last vestiges of warmth and sunlight outdoors before the wonderful Canadian winter is upon us.

While I’m off on a personal entry, I’ll take this moment to endorse a few different objects for consumption: The Shield, Rome, Weeds, March of Penguins, The Editors, The Cribs. Three television shows, a movie and two bands. That will be all for now.

Technorati is sluggish — been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always managed to find a few links that others services haven’t. To be fair, other services produce results that Technorati doesn’t, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Kottke wrote about it, so everyone else needs to weigh in (it’s kind of fun using the service to track people bitching about it).

One of the site’s core problems is bloat. You think it would be obvious that size doesn’t matter when it comes to indexing weblogs. Quality, not quantity. Take a look at Technorati, they whip out their big numbers and slap ’em down on the top of the page. Over 16.1 millions blogs and 1.4 billion posts indexed. Pretty impressive eh? I bet that earns them all an extra glance at all the cool nerd parties.

Now, let’s try to come up with a solution that reduces the number of sites in the index, speeds up searches and returns more valuable results. Sounds like a bit of a tough one. So, lets take a look at a diagram (actually a screen capture, but diagram sounds better). Do you see any big problems? Maybe BlogSpot? Five of the last seven are AdWords abuse/spam sites. I’m not sure how valuable 16.1 million weblogs are when you have crap like this around.

Don’t get me wrong, I have friends that use BlogSpot, it’s a nice easy way to get started online and maintain a simple weblog. Something has to change though. I’m sure Google is aware of the problem, it’s probably screwing up their index too.

How do we fix it? Technically, it’s a problem on Google’s end — they own Blogger and should do something about so many fake sign-ups. In the short-term, Technorati could remove BlogSpot from the index, it’s a bit of a blanket solution but it could help speed things up . Although, it probably wouldn’t help them in terms of Google buying out the service. On the other hand, Yahoo might appreciate the damage to its rival. It doesn’t even have to be a full-out ban on whatever.blogspot addresses, maybe just have a holding period or a number of links to their site from non-BlogSpot addresses.