Toronto is going overboard with this cupcake obsession. LA might have rejuvenated our obsession with mini cakes a few years ago (New York then followed, with the celebrity status Magnolia Bakery) but we’re taking it to the next level. A new store is opening literally every month, with fresh new faces taking new approaches to the classic treat. The obsession reached a peak last year as we saw these sweet treats everywhere from fashion show parties to the schools. So naturally, at Spotlight we profiled the obsession. We spoke about 7 places in the city where you can get cupcakes and how each one was different. The readers loved it, mail poured in like a flood.

That was last year, but only a few months ago. Since then, a half a dozen new stores have sprung up. This is during the winter too, imagine that. The Cupcake Shoppe on Yonge and Eglinton is no longer king as many have come to claim the throne of Cupcakeland.

So we’re back on the road. It’s a tough process you know — driving to all these fine little boutiques — mostly run by aspiring pastry chefs with their daughters and sons running around the kitchen. We’ve started tasting cupcakes from the new breed, and might I say we’re impressed! The obsession has climbed to a whole new level with….well, I can’t spoil it just yet. Our fingers are still sticky, face full of crumbs, sweet frosting between our teeth. The cameras haven’t stopped rolling, the opinions are still coming in.

Part 2 of the Cupcake Diaries in the near future.

This is great news. Not only has this been a very long wait, but Joomla 1.5 takes the standard of the web 2.0 platform to a new high.

http://joomla.org/

“It is with great pride that the Joomla! community announces to the world the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5 Stable [Khepri]. As a community of contributors, we have been through celebrations and tribulations. We have had fun, and we have worked hard. We have learned from and helped one another. What started two and a half years ago with a letter to the community has grown into a great opportunity for both the Joomla! project and community to benefit from these efforts and to consider our future.”

For those of you that don’t know. Joomla is a CMS (Content Management System) which is essentially a complete website out of the box. It not only allows you to publish a website with all the essential gear of business, but it allows you to follow the ‘blog’ mantra of being able to publish content or modify it from anywhere with an internet connection. No more FTP, no more designing individual HTML files and then having to wait to upload. With an extensive backend administration panel, easy customization and compatibility with thousands of modules, this is all you need.

This release is very personal for me. I’ve been anticipating the release of Joomla 1.5 for almost a year now, ever since I first tested the Beta builds. When we were thinking of switching Spotlight’s website from it’s archaic php/html hybrid design, we were looking at CMS systems that were out there. Drupal, Mambo, Joomla. I proposed the CMS platform and tested out Joomla to see if everyone would agree. Most of us did. 2 months of installation and testing followed with the previous version to bring our site to what it is today. We love it, it’s great, almost perfect. However, I was still anticipating 1.5, To the point where I was checking the joomla site daily for updates. Now here it is.

I won’t spoil it with my jabber, please visit joomla for the full info.

Wait till you see what I’ve got in store.

It’s all worth it in the end when you walk away from the desk having learnt something you didn’t know before. A chance to better yourself — adapt yourself to the ever changing intricacies of the world. This is why I love my Spotlight project.

Not a single day goes by where I don’t learn something new in Marketing, Promotions, Editing, Photography, Technology, Culture, Toronto, Advertising, Public Relations, Typography, Desktop Publishing. As I type this, I’ve had very little sleep from a night that was spent putting together the final touches on a Christmas project for the site. It looks great and I can’t wait to unveil it tomorrow. I’ll post a link here when it’s done.

**Update**
Here it is;
Spotlight Toronto Presents; The 2007 Christmas Guide

A huge relief..relief. It’s here, bigger, badder, stronger. Read the rest of this entry »