Brian Alvey

Looking for blog designers and developers

1902 days ago
I'm looking for some front-end and back-end web geniuses - or anyone who fits both roles - for some freelance design and development projects starting yesterday.
On the front-end I'm looking for people with:
- above average X/HTML + CSS knowledge (writing valid code)
- experience with carving up templates for CMS or blogs
- Photoshop, Illustrator and/or Flash skills
Scripting experience is a plus. Print design experience is also a plus.

On the back-end:
- CMS and blogging technology skills: RSS, trackbacks, pinging, XML-RPC, LWP robots, file uploads, image galleries, discussion forums, web services
- Windows/Linux server administration is a plus
- mail server administration is a plus
Much of what I'm working on is Microsoft-powered (ASP & SQL), but I have been known to mix in Perl, PHP and MySQL where it's a better fit. Of course, some of you are asking "Where isn't open source a better fit?" Nice.

If there's a single designer/developer out there who has these skills or a smaller web shop looking for a steady stream of projects, let me know.

[Update: I turned off comments on this post and hid the existing ones so it doesn't turn into a job forum. If you still want to respond, use my contact form. Thanks.]
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Charlie Harper Sucks

1924 days ago

On a recent Two and a Half Men (tied with Arrested Development on my list of TV's best written comedies), Charlie found out that there was a site called Charlie Harper Sucks and women were comparing their notes on dating him. Visiting the URL in the real world, you can read everything Charlie found in the episode and more.

I love it when a TV show mentions a new URL or a phone number that was created just for that show. On a recent Scrubs, Turk got a great cellphone number and if viewers called it, they got to hear a message from Turk himself.

When the episode aired, the cast and crew were reportedly taking turns answering the number themselves, which sounds great unless you're like me and you watch most TV on TiVo weeks after an episode has already aired.
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It's the most wonderful time of the year

1934 days ago
This is my favorite time of the year: the rush to get all of this year's stuff done before 2005 arrives.
1. Meet Rachael Ray. (Did it.)
2. Do a year's worth of accounting in one crazy marathon session. (Did it.)
3. Promise myself that next year I won't wait until December to catch up on everything. (Oh yeah, of course, no problem. Did it.)
4. Watch Casablanca for the first time. (Saw half of it. It's pretty good so far.)
All that's left now is Christmas shopping. I was just going to buy everyone I know either a signed picture from the cast of Friends or a signed Kobe jersey, but now I'm not so sure that it's a good idea.

Think BlogForSports would be interested in my sad story about how I bought an autographed Jason Giambi bobblehead doll three years ago and now it's like half its original size? I paid a lot for it and I don't think I should have to keep making payments.
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Windows 2005

1937 days ago

Merriam Webster's list of the top ten most looked-up words in 2004 has "blog" as the number one Word of the Year. Congratulations, bloggers.
The dangerous thing that many people haven't talked about yet is that "defenestration" is sitting at the bottom of the list and most of the words in between relate either to the election or to natural disasters. I'm not big into defenestration, but if I was (and remember, I'm not), I'd be looking at 2005 as a prime opportunity to dethrone "blog".

What would it really take? The election is over (almost). Next year probably won't have as many hurricanes or cicadas. All they have to do is defenestrate a few more people here and there and 2005's Word of the Year will be defenestration.

Look out.
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Beginner's Luxist

1938 days ago

Smallville fans, check this one out. It's our new site Luxist and the logo has a Superman symbol in the middle.
Luxist is sort of a spin-off of The Brian Alvey Weblog. They'll be taking some of the strain off of me by constantly posting about luxury items so I don't have to.

Awesome!
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Times Like These in Camden

1945 days ago

A year and a half ago, Jason and I had tickets for a Foo Fighters show in Camden, NJ. I didn't know when I got the tickets that Camden was practically a suburb of Philadelphia, but we made the best of it. We drove from Manhattan to Philadelphia, sat at Morimoto's sushi bar and had an amazing dinner served up by the Iron Chef himself.
Nearly out of gas, we crossed the bridge and parked at the Tweeter Center in Camden. Dave Grohl was entertaining, making fun of Bon Jovi and even working in a little bit of his Wanted Dead Or Alive into the Foo Fighters' Learn To Fly.
After the show we joined the herd of cars and slowly crawled out of the parking lot, keeping an eye on the fuel gauge. The town was dark and there wasn't a gas station in sight - just some run-down apartment buildings, a police station and some kind of prison complex. Somehow we made it to the next town without running out of gas, filled the tank and got on the highway home.
It was no surprise when I read yesterday that Camden, NJ was named the most-dangerous city in the U.S. It had my vote. Camden bumped Detroit into second place, but the list is based on year-old data. No doubt Pistons fans will put their city back in first place on next year's list.
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Go Gadling

1965 days ago

Doesn't everyone have one of those friends who swore that if Bush was re-elected that he or she would be leaving America and moving overseas? Maybe you don't have one of those friends, but you know a celebrity like Alec Baldwin who made a statement like that. Maybe you've never heard of Alec Baldwin. Maybe that friend was you.
Anyway, send that friend (or yourself or Alec Baldwin) a link to Escape Artist. Escape Artist promises to help you "Restart your life overseas", offering real estate links from around the globe, boat listings and helpful publications like "Escape From America Magazine".
If you just want a temporary break from the U.S. and the increasing chill, visit Gadling. It's our new adventure travel blog. Warms me up just thinking about it.
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Boo!

1969 days ago
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New England mortality rate to soar

1972 days ago

It seems a lot of older people in Boston and the rest of the Red Sox Nation have been hanging around waiting for a World Series win.
"We know people who are 90 years old who have just said: 'Just one championship before I die,'" Red Sox chairman Tom Werner said.

It reminds me of a sci-fi story, might have even been Stephen King, where this kid has to rush home every night to read his grandfather a book. What he reads is the end of one book and then the beginning of another one. That way the grandfather stays alive another day to find out how the latest story ends and it turns out that the grandfather is something like 150 years old.

In related news, our own "Red" didn't make it to see game four. 15 years ago he and his sister Annie left the Boca Raton Animal Shelter and have lived with my sister in Florida, New York, Indiana and now Canada. He was a great cat and the only one of their pets that really accepted their new baby daughter.
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Jon Stewart on Amazon

1977 days ago

I went to Amazon to look for some CDs and there was a promotion for Jon Stewart's new book, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. Instead of the usual blurb about why you should buy the book, there is a video clip from Jon himself explaining why you should buy it and what he loves about Amazon.

I've listened to the introduction to America (The Book) over on Engadget advertiser Audible.com and at this point I'd probably pay money to watch Jon Stewart read the phone book. He's hilarious.
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