I'd like to put my name down to help, if I may.

I don't have a huge amount of technical experience (in so much as I can do html and java, and can make php work with the use of brute force), but I've helped other people build websites, and I'm always eager to spread to good word of the Bird.

Thanks to both of you for posting - your willingness gives me hope that someday I might actually have a small team of people helping me make this site worthy of the artist it attempts to support. I wish I could do it all myself, but I just can't do with with a family to raise and a career to manage. I will contact each of you to feel out how we might work together and see if we can find a place for your contributions.

Now, let me speak of ideals - basically, I am looking for everything; I would LOVE to find:

• a graphic designer that has real skills for making this site look nice,
• someone that passionately loves Bird, has the desire and capability (time-wise) to update this site often, and is experienced enough with content management (or capable and willing to learn) that they can actually do it,
• someone that has hardcore JavaScript, ASP.NET and C# skills
• someone that has DNN (DotNetNuke) skinning and module experience

Now, that said, those are the ideals. When I first decided to do more with the domain name than simply host lyrics (which is what this site was only a few years ago), I was going to write the site from scratch. As happens though, I just didn't have the time and thus chose to go the route of using DNN as the framework with which to build this site. I made a simple skin for it (which is what you are looking at now (need to change that striped background - hideous!!!!)) but have not had much time to do much else with it. The lyrics page is a hack, as it is merely an IFrame hosting a separate set of ASP.NET pages that contain the lyrics - it is otherwise oblivious to the DNN app, i.e. there is no access to user accounts for that part of the site.

There are a few people I am working with during my day job right now that are actively involved with DNN development, and if I can get them to give me a super-quick intro do module development, that would go a long way to helping me add to this site's capabilities.

Anyway, this is probably WAY more information than will be useful, but I thought I would post it regardless in the hopes that I can get someone to step up.

charybdis wrote I have to admit I had a peek at your personal site after posting my initial response and I kind of guessed you'd prefer to use ASP.net and IIS after reading some of it. I have no, nor a desire to have, practical experience with ASP.net, C# and IIS development. I am also of the opinion that JavaScript use should be kept to a minimum and should only progressively enhance websites rather than be critical to their functionality. I can't help but feel your choice of the .net stack will only inhibit your efforts to garner developers as I believe it is relatively esoteric in the amateur web development world. If you were to reconsider, I would probably recommend a fresh installation of Drupal (I don't know if there are scripts to import the database contents from DotNetNuke) that would be incrementally tweaked and refined as soon as possible while a long-term, possibly custom, solution is considered.

I made my choices based on what would be easiest for me; my work as a professional software engineer, for better or worse, is based on ASP.NET and C#. If time were a luxury I had, I might've written the site using erlang (which would have really limited my ability to find help!) or Ruby or Python. PHP, which is what Drupal is written with, might allow me to find more "amateur web [developers]" but would limit my ability to participate because there is no chance I am going to spend cycles on a language that will do me no good otherwise - as a software consultant for the company I work for, there is essentially no work doing PHP. A "long-term, possibly custom solution" would be ideal, but I really don't know that I will ever have time for that and thus would be locking myself into PHP and Drupal if I moved that way now. I hope you can appreciate where I am coming from.

As far as your opinion of JavaScript - how did you arrive at that? Are you a professional developer? JavaScript is gaining more momentum as a language and a better way of doing things. I don't know you at all, but I would guess you either don't know enough about it to know better or you know enough and are simply one of tiny minority that don't care for it. That said, there are quite a few problems/issues/concerns with its use, but for the majority of users, it presents no problems at all. Granted, I am not going to go crazy with it on a site like this, but I do loves me some JavaScript. :P In fact, it is currently my favorite language to develop with; it is pretty sweet.

charybdis wrote I'd like to lend a hand, but I can't really think of anything I could do other than convert mockups to standards-complaint, semantic HTML/CSS for future extrapolation to ASP.net markup output. Let me know if there's anything you think I can help with.

As I indicated in my email to you, I really don't know that there would be much I could use your help with. I am really sorry, I wish you could help. If there is ever a change to things that would create a spot that might be a good fit for your skill set, I will let you know. Thank you again for your willingness, as that is more than I can reasonably expect given that software engineers probably make up a tiny percentage of Bird's fan base!

Thanks!