Author: Dan Rubin

On January 30th, pre-acquisition members of Flickr received an email. For those of you who didn’t receive the message, it looked something like this. The gist of the message was that, on or before March 15th 2007, us “old skool” members would have to roll our original Flickr usernames (our email addresses) into new or existing Yahoo! accounts.

Stick Wit U

Now, I’m not going to get involved with the discussion about the merits of this decision, especially since I’m going to have to create a special Yahoo! account just for Flickr (personal preference, yes, but only because I only use my existing Yahoo! account for communication with a few specific offline organizations, and combining them with Flickr just doesn’t make sense), but I thought in the spirit of us old skool members sticking with Flickr for so long, through thick and thin, I’d whip up an easy way to display our “age” (perhaps you’d prefer “steadfastness”?). So, with one month to go until the deadline, here they are: Flickr Old Skool Badges.

Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges!

Each badge is a 48px x 48px transparent PNG, perfect for layering right on top of your existing Flickr profile image. Just right-click on the links below to save each image to your computer.

• Diagonal Badge (top)
• Diagonal Badge (bottom)
• Top Badge
• Left Badge
• Bottom Badge

No usage restrictions, just credit me and link back here if you alter and redistribute them, and don’t redistribute the original versions (link directly to this entry).

Old Skool users rawk!

Updates

• Thanks to Patrick Haney for suggesting the bottom diagonal variation.

The finalists for the 2007 SXSW Web Awards have been announced, and I’m humbled that SuperfluousBanter has been nominated in the Blog category (which, somewhat strangely for this site, is described as including “Sites that revolutionize the power of publishing by providing regularly updated content of a personal or professional nature.”—I won’t make a direct comment on the “regularly updated” part, though I’m sure Garrett might agree that I’ve revolutionized the art of getting traffic without posting…), in what seems to have been an incredibly difficult year for the judges to even select finalists.

I’m up against some tough competition, including a fellow Sidebar Creative founder:

• April Zero
• BuzzFeed
• Snook.ca (go Jon!)
• Twitter

Now, Twitter may be considered by some to have something of an edge, especially in the “number of authors” category, but it’s definitely revolutionary, and has become a blogging substitute for many people already. The other finalists can definitely hold their own, and frankly I think I peed a little when I read the list ;)

I’m honored to be in such company, and this may just be the final kick in the pants that I’ve needed to get off my duff and clean this place up—I mean, seriously, it’s like no one’s lived here for ages, and just left without washing the dishes in the sink…

Finally, don’t forget to cast your vote once a day in the People’s Choice awards. And I mean that: don’t vote for this site unless you actually enjoy it (and if you want to see more content, hint-hint ;) but make sure you vote for your favorite no matter what, every day.

Today, a new team is born. No, it’s not a new company (per se), but a collective of developers and designers who all share the same goals, run their own consultancies, are active in the web standards community, and want bigger and better things for the web community.

We are authors, designers, programmers, and thinkers. We love XHTML/CSS, we champion usability while striving for good looks (in our designs ;) and we love branding.

The list really goes on and on (we get along really well, we’re all musicians, etc.) but the most important thing is that together, we will be able to tackle larger projects than we could on our own (and perhaps more importantly, larger clients may approach us as a group where they might not individually) and have a ton of fun in the process.

So, who are we? As individuals, you may know the gang as Steve Smith, Jon Snook and Bryan Veloso. You can even listen to us ramble on about it on a brand new episode of Live from the 101. But it’s the sum of the parts that really makes this exciting.

We are Sidebar Creative, and we’re just getting started.

Blogger template questions? Please search and/or post to the official Blogger Help Google Group—you are much more likely to get a response there than by emailing me.

A little over 2 years ago, Blogger relaunched, and featured all-new templates designed by some of your favorite designers. I was lucky enough to be included in that list, and my template set, Thisaway, was well received and has enjoyed some popularity over the last few years. That is, unless you’re an IE user who happened to put italics in a certain parts of your posts.

Woe is IE

IE/Win suffers from a curious bug (gasp!) related to the use of italics in certain situations. The wonderful folks at Position is Everything have documented this as much as possible (or as one would want to), and, as luck would have it, their fix works on Thisaway.

Why now?

I’ve been emailing the fix to people for quite a while now, on a case-by-case basis, and it’s also been posted to the Blogger Google Group, but I finally coordinated with the nice folks at Blogger a few months ago to start incorporating the fix into the live templates, so new users of the template would get the fixed version. Happily, I can now say that as of a few weeks ago, the fix is now live, and seems to test out just as it should.

Fixing existing blogs

What if you’ve been using one of my Thisaway templates for a while? If you want to update your blog to incorporate the fix, you have two options.

Option 1: Start from scratch

If you haven’t made any customizations to the blog template (e.g. adding elements to the sidebar, changing the CSS, adding a custom header image, etc.), you can simply log into your Blogger admin area, select the “Template” tab, then click “Pick new” in the template sub-nav, and select the same Thisaway color scheme you are currently using. Then just republish to update your blog with the fixed version.

Option 2: Apply the fix manually

This isn’t as scary as you might think, though it takes a few more steps than Option 1. After logging into your Blogger admin area, click the “Template” tab, and then focus your attention on the text editing area on that page.

You’re looking for the following CSS in the upper portion of the template code:

.post-body div {
font-size: 13px;
line-height: 18px;
margin: 10px, 0px;
}

Change that to match the following:

.post-body div {
font-size:13px;
line-height:18px;
margin:0;
height:1%;
overflow:visible;
}

The last line of the original is changed, and two additional lines have been added.

Click “Save Template Changes” and then republish to update your blog.

Hot on the heels of my trip to San Francisco, I had the chance to spend nearly an hour as a guest on Bryan Veloso’s “Live from the 101” podcast Wednesday night (although, come on Bryan, isn’t it time to change the name? j/k…) We talked about trying to record it in person while I was in California, but it didn’t work out (this trip), so my apologies to all Bryan’s listeners who were miffed at having to wait a few extra days for this episode :)

Bryan is a talented designer (one who now owns a shiny new MacBook Pro), but he knows how to shoot the shit, which is exactly what we did for 55 minutes. Curious to find out what two designers can talk about for that long?

Check out the ‘cast.