TwoFeetThick.com is seeking an intern with responsibilities including general website maintenance and research.

Background

As we state, TwoFeetThick.com “has presented original articles on Pearl Jam’s music and history, including the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology” since 2003. For the past year (wow, is it only just a year?), the website has been hosted on the WordPress platform and we are looking for someone with experience in that area.

Ok, let’s drop the formal talk for a second. What’s the real deal here? On April 5, we will enter our eighth year of putting our Pearl Jam thoughts into words and pictures, and we are looking for ways to deliver to our readers all the good stuff that is in our brains more quickly and efficiently.

Responsibilities

We are looking for the following:

• A motivated individual looking to develop their website management experience
• Experience with WordPress is mandatory
• Experience with HTML/CSS/PHP is preferred, but not mandatory
• Duties will include
  • WordPress site and theme configuration
  • Research on new features and plugins
  • Formatting of drafts of new articles
  • Maintenance of article tagging and SEO optimization
• You don’t have to be a Pearl Jam fan. Seriously. But it would be nice

Our expectation is that this internship will last for 3 months and we are asking for 5-10 hours a week of work.

Since the beginning, I have been the sole programmer of TwoFeetThick.com. The experience was invaluable and you can’t imagine how much this site has meant towards my personal – and professional – development. For that reason, we are offering this internship as a way of giving someone a chance to gain legitimate Website maintenance experience, and contribute an item to their resume during these challenging times that may help them in a future career on the Internet.

For better or worse, TwoFeetThick.com has no revenue because we do display advertisements (laughably, we tried Amazon referrals and have earned a whopping $5.14 in five years).  Therefore this is not a paid internship, sorry.

How to Apply

To apply, please email us at internships@twofeetthick.com. You don’t have to attach your resume, but make sure to at least include links to a site or sites that you’ve worked on and describe your role on that site. We will acknowledge the receipt of all applications, and after a review period, contact you for follow-ups and convey the status of your application.

What this really means

In reality, we’ve been working on this site for over eight years, if you include the time it took to put together the site. Back in those days, I created the site in Java and that served its purpose for many years. However, as time went on – and as time became a hot commodity – we needed to improve the site by delivering news, more articles and a better way to update the Concert Chronology.  Basically, reduce time programming and increase time writing.

Now that we’ve been on WordPress for a year, our ability to update the site frequently has increased tenfold.  We’ve also harnessed the power of the community with our recent request for Concert Chronology submissions.

This is not where it will end. We have a lot of exciting things planned for 2010, and as they enter their 20th year as a band, our passion for working on this site will continue for as long as Pearl Jam’s passion for making music endures.

Effective immediately, TwoFeetThick.com has added CAPTCHA to each form where our readers can post comments.  In addition to your name, email address and comment, you will now have to type in the code shown in a box (i.e. CAPTCHA) which will verify that you are a good-hearted human being posting a legitimate comment on the article.

Unfortunately there are stupid people in Internetville who use comment forms such as ours to spam their futile marketing efforts, which we will not tolerate.  This causes comments to be flooded with spam, effectively causing our readers to say “why bother” and commenting will die.

Please let us know if you have any concerns, or have any problems commenting on our articles.

The Pearl Jam Concert Chronology you know and love from Five Horizons has a new home here at Two Feet Thick. Jean Bruns, who built the CC at 5H since 1995, has recently decided to retire from maintaining it, and has offered that honor to the three of us at Two Feet Thick. With her encouragement, we’ve transported the CC here and have already begun updating it (we added 2005) and adding further info about older shows.

We want to thank Jean – not only for giving us the amazing opportunity to ensure the Concert Chronology’s future – but also for her tireless decade of work, along with 5H partner Caryn Rose, in bringing PJ fans everywhere the single most useful, detailed, and widely read document of Pearl Jam’s live history in existence. Click here for Jean’s message about the transition.

The Pearl Jam Concert Chronology, for those unfamiliar, is a comprehensive catalog of the live performances of PJ and its members. It contains all known date, setlist, and venue info, first-hand accounts and related artifacts for every known show since PJ formed in 1990. At TFT, the CC will continue to grow as future shows occur and older info is unearthed and factual accuracy will continue to be of utmost importance. We can’t attend every PJ concert, so we’ll need your contributions to help us fill in the blanks! To make that easy, we’ve put a submission form at the bottom of each CC page where you can send us what you know, and we’ll credit you by name.

These Times They Are A’Changin

In transferring the CC to TwoFeetThick.com, we wanted to continue the ethos of simplicity and accuracy when presenting the information. Here is a short list of notable observations and minor changes from the original CC:

• For its initial launch on TwoFeetThick.com, the core elements of each show – location, attendance, set list, notes – are being reproduced in their original navigation structure, i.e. 1990/1991, 1992 (two parts), 1998 (three parts), etc. Future navigation and search features will be made available.
• 5H’s notes about each given show will remain as is. When we add notes to older shows, they will be listed as “TFT Notes:”
• Images of concert memorabilia including posters, flyers, handbills and set lists have been retained, with permission, from 5H. We will be adding more as we get them.
• Links inherent to 5H have been removed but remain on FiveHorizons.com. These include links to mp3 samples, “Jean’s/Caryn’s Photos”, “Caryn’s Review”
• Updates to information will be noted on the home page of the CC (most recent), in running archive and annotated in the concert entry itself

The simple text format of the CC has been retained, and to ensure readability we have made the CC pages extend the full width of the site, removing extra navigational features often housed on the left pane of our site.

A Brief Look at the CC’s History

Ten years ago, Pearl Jam itself was barely five years old and a collection of this touring history lived in the form of plain text files hosted on a university server which few people outside of the alt.music.pearl-jam newsgroup even knew about. A year later, Five Horizons assumed maintenance of the “Pearl Jam Concert Chronology” – “The CC” – which since that time has been the de facto source for PJ’s now 15-year-plus touring history. Since September, 2002, 5H had ceased site updating most sections of the site with the exception of the Concert Chronology, but has now decided to archive the entire site. Read more about this transition from Jean here.

The CC on 5H

The CC was launched on FiveHorizons.com on September 10, 1996

The CC’s origins trace back to discussions on the usenet group alt.music.pearl-jam (born on January 28, 1994) and the Garden of Stone (GoS) mailing list. PJ’s Ten, Vs. and Vitalogy tours were fresh in may fans’ minds and over the next year these facts were collected and maintained by fan Caleb Lavergne, with the result becoming known as a document called the “Tour Book”. Along with another anthology, the “Video Guide”, the information in the Tour Book was a near-complete compendium of Pearl Jam’s touring history from 1990-1994. In 1995, the seeds of Five Horizons were planted and growing quickly, and the Tour Book morphed into the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology, launching with the debut of Five Horizons on September 10, 1996.

As the 1996 tour unfolded, fans bristled with excitement as the set list and notes of a previous night’s concert would be available by the next morning, delivered with the consistency of the morning newspaper. Poster, flyer and set list scans were added treats, the Video Guide (with screenshots) was integrated into show notes, and well-written reviews were often posted – the best by 5H co-founder Caryn Rose – which all added to the high caliber of the CC. As the years and tours continued, the information accumulated even for older shows, as fans just subscribing to the Internet found their way to 5H and often provided facts and clarity to shows where little to nothing was previously known.

The CC’s simple black-text-on-white format allowed for easy reading without a lot of then-trendy visual gimmicks. Most fans can remember the first time they found the CC, which often included spending hours or days reading up on the tales of concerts past. The time on long plane flights or car trips was easily passed with a print-out of the CC to read. Checking for updates was a daily ritual for most of us who couldn’t get enough PJ tour facts.