Geoff,
I tried to email you at the adress you left in the comment but it didn’t work. Please try emailing me joseph@antijoe.com or leaving another message with a working email! 
-Joseph
I have recently been working on a magazine styled website for http://www.teachers-alliance.org
My choice of software was of course Wordpress with the Arras theme (perfect for that magazine look) and a gaggle of plugins. It was difficult for me to find just the right plugin, one that looked great and did what it needed to do. Eventually I finished with these 14 plugins. If you’re looking to set up a similar website maybe this list will help you to get started.
Autolink URI http://www.semiologic.com/software/autolink-uri/
Automagically turns written links into clickable links. Like the one just above. Invaluable for the lazy webmaster.
Avatars http://www.sterling-adventures.co.uk/blog/2008/03/01/avatars-plugin/
Well integrated and appealing for authors and visitors alike, after all, we all like to see who we’re talking to – right?
Drop Caps http://instantsolve.net/blog/plugins/
Nothing says “magazine” like an article, page or post that begins with a big giant letter. People notice the little touches.
flickrRSS http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/
If you have photos in flickr this widget is probably one of the best for sharing your images on your site. You can choose random, user, user set, or a group. It’s nice to use if you want to encourage a reader to look “beneath the fold”.
Newsletter http://www.satollo.net/plugins/newsletter
It does what it says on the tin. You can send a newsletter to subscribers about your site. There is a paid version that has an automatic scheduler for roughly $20. This is the only paid plugin I have, and I think it’s worth it if you are looking for a way of keeping subscribers informed about what your latest articles are and so forth. Having waded through the dreck of other newsletter plugins I can honestly tell you that this one is a little gem.
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam http://www.642weather.com/weather/scripts-wordpress-captcha.php
CAPTCHA based anti-spam plugin. Easy and almost totally painless.
Sidebar Login http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sidebar-login/
The fact that Wordpress doesn’t automaticly do what this plugin does befuddles me some-what. The fact that this plugin exists pleases me greatly. It’s a widget that lets you logon, and then once logged on has a link to your logoff, profile, and dashboard. If you have avatars installed it will even show that. Magnifique!
Simple:Press Forum http://simplepressforum.com/
If you want a fully fledged and integrated forum on your Wordpress blog then there is only realy one choice, and that is Simple:Press.
SlideShare http://yoast.com/wordpress/slideshare/
If you want to embed a slide show from http://www.slideshare.net this plugin makes it a two-second job. Wordpress freaks out slightly if you drop a huge wad of <embed> object tags into an article. This plugin solves that problem.
Socialize This http://www.fullondesign.co.uk/socialize-this
A series of little buttons allowing people to share your article on sites such as facebook, twitter, and reddit etcetera. I popped mine at the end of the article.
Social Links Sidebar http://www.commareus.com/
It took me a long, long time to find this plugin. All I wanted was an icon based plugin that allowed people to be taken to my facebook fan page or my twitter account so that they could follow me. This is the only plugin that could do that and wasn’t so hideously ugly that I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Even though it says “sidebar” you can place it in the footer with the Arras theme. Genius!
Status Updater http://www.francesco-castaldo.com/plugins-and-widgets/fb-status-updater/
Another plugin that eluded me for far too long! This plugin pushes updates to facebook, twitter, myspace etcetera announcing that a new article has been posted. It’s a good way of dragging eyeballs back to your site.
W3 Total Cache http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
The only cache that didn’t break my site. Also reduced the entire load time of my page from 15 seconds down to 9 seconds. Impressive!
WP-DBManager http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
It optimizes your database automatically at regular intervals. Another god send for a lazy webmaster such as myself.
I hope this little article helps someone, I know it would have helped me if I had found something like it before I had to test any number of god forsaken plugins myself. If it does help you, please leave a little note telling me so, I’d like to see what you’ve created!
Antijoe.com is spending the week in black. Why? Because the Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won’t make anyone safer.
Read more about it, and what you can do at http://www.internetblackout.com.au/
I’ve been fighting the good fight with the Teachers’ Alliance. I’ve made them a very pretty website and an ultra nice forum. Hopefully between us all we can create some positive change in education. I’m entirely happy with my role of web master; although I may need to add the title of editor to my résumé. The interface for adding articles isn’t hard, but it is detailed, and details always escape new users. Fingers crossed for a better world though!
I’ve been on a news diet
I’m writing this even though I’m drunk
Humanity step back!
Fierce faces and tightened lips
Salacious
Blood and bone
I’ve hidden my eyes, to no avail
Humanity, what are you? Really?
Cruel, cruel beyond words
You’d step on the neck of a naked man if it meant you could have one more helping
Christ
Why not be kind?
Hiss.
Hiss.
Snakes dwell in the heart of man, not by nature but by choice
Fuck you
I’ve danced you know, at the edge, with the misfits and the junkies, and the whores of intellect.
The heart bleeds, but for what? For whom? A tidal wave of hungry ants
Cracking bones
Fire in my heart fanned by newspaper and cathode lights
FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! Shouted in a crowded theatre.
Art has lost its way, not a light for truth
Art is décor
Art is fashion
Art is fascism
No one wants the truth anymore
Because the truth is ugly as sin
And we are all sinners
I want to be nice, I want to be good
But all I am is ash and dust.
Ash and dust
Ash and dust
Who will save you? No one? God is dead
But I am happy
I am in love
I see, but I do not comprehend
Pretty lights, spelling out doom
Good ideas, gone to waste
Cut to the centre
And what do you find?
A broken heart? Or a broken mind?
I love you more than sparkles
More than hairless cats (which you don’t like, despite me)
No cameras! No pictures! Enough!
Transparency!
I hate civil servants with their appalling aversion to accountability. Bitches, you’re here for the common good. Serve it or get the fuck out of my face.
Why isn’t drunken poetry considered art, when heroin is?
I can’t afford heroin
I can afford Herron brand aspirin
I will need aspirin tomorrow
If all my poems go for 2 pages is 3 pages too much?
I love him. I know this with my feet, but not my head.
English is too slow
So is typing
Ancient runes to guard my house, in languages unknown
A dingo ate her baby
A dingo ate her baby
Seriously, who leaves a baby alone in dingo country?
Poor baby
Poor mother
Poor country
Poor dingo, only after an easy feed
This land knows I don’t belong
Could fake it in Europe, but not here
Spit me out?
Spit me out?
Spit me out?
Advertising makes us repetitive
And dull.
The land is still suspicious. It knows I’m a traitor from the shining lands, the singing lands, the signing lands
A symbol for hope. Kalapesh!
A symobol for hate. Turomoch!
A symbol to escape. Taskameh!
And then, I will be free.
Old songs are traps, as are old lovers
Old ideas, old habits, old times, paths, memories
Page 4
Four
For
For better or for worse
You will decay, fall apart
Send a distress signal, no hope
Entropy is Calvinistic nonsense!
No matter what they say
No matter what the spell-checker says
Fire!
Air!
Earth!
Water!
Drown! Down! Down! Fire! Fire! Fire!
Calypso!
Skeksis! Ah hah!
The truth is in me, deep down, under all this shit
Come on
I need an exit, a way of floating to the surface, a get out of jail free care, Uranus
Energy, entropy
Sometimes, I piss in my bathroom sink, it’s just convenient.
Fire! Fire! Earth, air!
Pythagoras is a shit and a cunt and he never put out, I know, I was there!
My door doesn’t close, it’s probably a metaphor.
I wish I was certain that I was popular.
I fear the worst
I wish I knew that he loved me
I’m so damaged
Aren’t we all?
You never talk to me.
I am you.
Can you solve entropy?
No.
Why?
This world is dead. It will end. It was never meant to be
Tell me more
There is nothing to tell.
Can I escape?
You already have.
Really?
Really.
Can you explain how?
The material world is a mental trick. Like moving the decimal place when you multiply by 100
It feels very real
That’s sort of the point
Explain?
You wanted to know, didn’t you? About action and consequence?
This sounds like shitty new age crap.
The saints got drunk too, to figure out morality and wickedness, it’s no less “real”
Anything useful to tell me? Anything to smooth the way?
A + K / 14 = E^16 * k
Really?
Really.
The uncertain heart hesitates upon the precipice
And with grim horror, realizes that it has already started to fall
Unwilling and unready into that unspeakable embrace
The killer that hunts without tooth or claw has caught him
Bring him scorpions or serpents or any terror of the deep that he can defeat with sword or cudgel
But ancient gods, forgotten and unnamed are called forth from the darkness to deliver him from love
His heart burns with a fire that does not consume and cannot be quenched
That man is me
And I am doomed.
The madman walks through the street, oddly dressed
Some nod, some smirk, some keep their distance
Wary eyes at their corners, keeping guard
He moves on, uncaring or oblivious
Standing then in the middle of an open field at the edge of town
Watched by others with pity in their eyes
He starts to sway, his arms outstretched like a crucifix
His palms facing heaven, his hands pointing down
As if stuck in some firmament, his fingers curl
The ground shakes, and at the time, we don’t connect the two, cause and effect
People run to doorways as champagne flutes, crystal mice and glass unicorns jitter-bug to the edge, and then oblivion
Around him the earth heaves like a new dawn
Giant sheets of rusted iron like red ribbon conceal him, then lift him up
We stand in silenced awe
The whole city sinks with the great displacement of transmogrified clay
An impossible tower of ten thousand scarlet strips
Stairs cling to the exterior and spiral up around the tower’s impossible bulk
We begin our desperate pilgrimage to the high point
The wind clawing at us, the stairs calling like crows
The tower rocks with each great gust
We call out to the stranger but no one answers
The path leads up, and sometimes down
Yet we push on through the aftershocks of sudden transformation
At the top, there is no one.
The stranger is gone.
All that remains is a tiny inscription that reads,
“I have always loved you”.
Having read the Wikipedia entry on Zygmunt Bauman and one of his papers, “Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty”. I’ve been thinking about the camera. Bauman looks at the camera twice, firstly as the creator of still images, and then as the creator of moving images.
He points to the still image as a cultural anchor, framing our world in a permanence of the past and a token of certainty, the moving image by contrast frames modernity as transient and insubstantial. In all fairness, Bauman is quite old and clearly not a child of the internet. If the previous two incarnations of the camera create a sense of permanence and then impermanence, what does the current crop of youtube clips indicate?
I would suggest that they point to a community of production and consumption, where permanence and impermanence is not the central issue, but the relationships between the images and their authenticity is the most pressing concern. Relationships that are authentic now guide the zeitgeist.
This is not however my main concern, another idea that Bauman traces is the idea that modern society tries to take out the uncertainty of life, but such an endeavor is simply not possible with all people in every society. From this arises the specter of “the other” or as Bauman calls him, “the stranger”. The fear of the unknown and uncontrollable now has a face; it’s the pedophile, or the Jew, or the Muslim, or the black, the gay, the refugee. Some of these groups are shadows (such as the pedophile), some are real (such as the Jews), but what they have in common is that none are threats unto themselves. All the hand waving about the risks of anyone of the previous groups has nothing to do with actual risk, and everything to do with fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable.
After the great depression, the stranger was the Jew; and we all know how that turned out, don’t we?
So as a photographer, where do I see the lens now? Society has come to see the camera as a symbol of authority; the news cameraman and the CCTV are both symbols of power. When I publicly wield a camera I do so to take pictures. Culturally however, I have assumed a tool of authority for my own ends. People are shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that people can take their photo in public and there’s nothing they can do about it. After all, the image is mine. I used to tell people that cameras really can’t steal your soul, but I sort of missed the point.
People aren’t actually concerned with their souls being stolen when their picture is taken in public. They’re worried that they will become unwilling participants in a cycle of production and consumption. They fear an asymmetrical relationship between the viewer and the subject; and this state of mind is only possible because of a disintegration of the concept of society, and the attendant loss of the public-self. I am “The Stranger”, and suddenly everyone believes that they are islands unto themselves, and the camera becomes the conquistador.
The camera is not a crown, but in a society where individuals distance themselves from moral duty as being “a private concern”, the camera with its power to document and critique the subject beyond the influence of their own network of relationships, it becomes an instrument of power. I personally welcome the scrutiny, as a person who is publicly moral, and the rest be damned.
I have a love/hate relationship with chaos. I will openly and freely admit to enjoying the excitement of a last minute deadline, a dozen conflicting commands, or total technological failure. I will also admit that this is a sad and pitiful way to get one’s thrills.
So I’m going to be more organised. Zen like if you will. I have installed gtd-php to manage my work flow, but more than that, I have decided that I want to do my life differently. Reacting to chaos leaves no room for pleasure, and too much excitement leaves me drained.
I have things I want to do, and things I need to do, and they both shall have their doing.
The body looked like it had crawled through a muddy field, which annoyed Michael even more.
“I just cleaned the goddamned floor!”
Stewart looked at Michael, his mouth slightly ajar.
“I really think you’re autistic sometimes, a dead body appears in your lounge room and you obsess about the floor.” He paused. “Maybe you have some sort of cleaning psychosis?”
They both looked at the body again. He (and it was a he, the scraggly beard left no doubt) had broken the dining room window, had crawled muddy, bloody and bleeding across the floor, cleverly avoiding setting the alarm off, but inexplicably rolling up nearly half of the floor rug in the lounge room. He was barefoot, wearing overly tight jeans and a baggy old shirt that proudly proclaimed “Our community, our future”.
“I bet he’s a junkie” declared Michael.
Stewart merely rolled his eyes “Well, he’s only a corpse now”.
“We should call the police”
“I should take some photos”
“Stewart! Fuck you’re grim.”
Stewart merely looked earnest “The other people in my photo group would kill for an opportunity like this! Look at him! Look at the shirt! Look at the mis en scene!”
“Well if they did, at least they’re problem solving for themselves.” Michael hesitated, “Grab your camera, you’ve got five minutes”.
It had taken quite some effort to restore the house, an ex-rental that according to local legend has housed bikies and all manner of unsavory sorts. Michael stood now in the front yard, unlike the muddy back yard; the front yard was piled high with debris from the renovation. Pieces of pipe, plastic and copper, old bricks, half bricks, odd bricks wrapped in plastic for some unknowable purpose, plasterboard and empty plastic bags with the remnants of paper labels long faded and now mysterious, and also inexplicable lengths of wires bent into crazy shapes suggesting gouged eyes and tetanus shots all at once. The pile of rubbish was an impressive display of urban prosperity and was greatly admired by many in the street.
The police arrived. A young man who looked like he’d rather be inside, and a small woman who looked liked she enjoyed being assertive.
“You called about a dead body?” the woman asked as she tried to look stern and helpful at the same time.
“I’m Michael”. Michael offered a handshake, “What a bitch” he thought.
She grimaced a smile “Sergeant Alexton, and this is Sergeant Pavkovic”.
Sergeant Pavkovic offered up a sly grin at the social maneuvering between the two.
“They’re not sending a forensics team?” asked Stewart inside.
“No” snapped Sergeant Alexton “We have to confirm there is actually a crime scene first!”
Michael made a point of looking at the body and then at Alexton again. Pavkovic risked another grin.
“He came in from the backyard, probably jumped the fence” Said Pavkovic absently, “So strange”.
Alexton bent down to look at the face of the dead man more closely “Christ!”
“Christ you’re dramatic” thought Stewart as he unconsciously toyed with the camera in his shirt pocket.
“It’s David Cooper!”
“Is he famous?” asked Michael, it was a cruel thing to do, but he couldn’t resist.
Alexton managed to look shocked “Um, no. He’s a local junkie and dealer”
“See! I told you it would be a junkie” said Michael looking at Stewart.
She ignored Michael, “Rumor was, he owed a fair bit of cash to some bikie gang, probably came to do your house over” said Alexton triumphantly.
“That doesn’t explain why he’s dead though” said Stewart.
Never knowing it, both Michael and Stewart thought the exact same thing “She’s no Miss Marple”.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Alexton said turning on them; she had taken it upon herself to be assertive. In her mind this seemed a reasonable response to the mood of disrespect she was sensing. The fact that a dead junkie in your lounge room may invoke an emotional response in the occupants never really crossed her mind. “Because this will be investigated, and you have to cooperate fully you know, if you don’t it could go to court and you’ll be a hostile witness!”
Michael let the bluff hang in the air, out of politeness, and no small measure of pity for the woman. He decided not to mention the house’s legendary status.
“How soon until I can wash the floors?” asked Michael to the eye-rolling of Stewart. Pavkovic nodded sagely at the question, there was a lot of mud, but at least it wasn’t on carpet.
“I don’t know” steamed Alexton “The forensics people will tell you, I shall need statements.”
So Stewart and Michael gave statements, which were mostly drawn out versions of “We came in, and he was on the floor”, forensics came and went, as did a glazier the next day to repair the window. It would be a number of weeks before the autopsy would reveal the cause of death to be not bikies, or drugs, or bullets, but a simple heart attack brought on, one might suppose, by hard living and stress.
Michael however was more intent on washing the floor. It was clean, but his uncommon cleaning obsession meant that he kept trying to “scrub the death out” of the very spot where the body was found well into the evening.
Stewart looked on and eventually asked “When you replaced the floor, what was there underneath?”
“There was no underneath!” replied Michael “We’ll I mean there was a floor, but it was shocking you could pick up any board it was all so rotten, and the rubbish underneath, piles of it, the sort of thing that harbors rats and worse”.
“Humor me Michael, can I see the pile?”
“You’ve already seen it; it’s the one at the front”
“Humor me” he repeated as they walked outside, and it was there that Stewart’s keen eye picked out something, a brick in black plastic. “Now why would anyone wrap up a brick?” he asked as he began to unwrap the object.
“When it’s not a brick!” answered Michael as they stared at the smiling face of Douglas Mawson gazing out serenely from the plastic. Old fashioned paper money.
They both spent some minutes looking at the $100 notes.
“I think I saw about five of them, bricks that is” said Michael.
“I think your renovation just paid for itself” replied Stewart grinning as they both turned, and started to eagerly rummage through the pile of urban prosperity in the evening’s fading light.