ok, I've bought the components and everything works as expected. yay! 
now on to some questions... I'm going trhough the shift register tutorial and
it's running allright (with 8 leds at the moment). I'm drawing the plans at the
moment for a prototype, next week I can lasercut the enclosure.
until then I have some questions about binary math... I was never good
at it at school, but now I seem to need it. I was just looking at the code
example, where there is the line:
shiftOut(dataPin, clockPin, 255);
which lights all eight LEDs.
Am I right that 255 is all eight binary values (0-7) converted to decimal again?
so it's:
000+001+010+011+100+101+110+111
unfortunately I'm unsure how to add these digits together... I looked
at the wikipedia tutorial, but I'm still unsure... Can anyone help?
thanks for all your help! next week there will be pictures! 
update: haha, just found out it's alot easier... 255 is 11111111 so I guess
each bit represents the pin on the shift register. so if I would like to only light up
the first led, it would be 1000000, or 64, correct?