I'm not sure if anyone noticed (or maybe I am just late to the party) but here's a whole write up on using the 74HC595
I'm kinda ticked because I was having fun reversing other peoples code using different controllers. I guess it might be useful so here are the links I was using before I found the above.
http://www.basicmicro.com/downloads/docs/74hc595.pdf
-jamaal 