Social Networking startup looking for freelance PHP, MySQL, & AJAX coder that's fast, reliable, and currently available to work on a unique project to architect a system where people can share "short stories" within the site's community and/or with a select group of "Friends" or contacts that they follow in the site's network.

Each "story" would be open to "reviews" and contributing to a set of statistics based on words that appear in the stories on the site. Ability to link user accounts with Facebook IDs through Facebook Connect or the Facebook API is key.

This would be a two-phase project ideally lasting no longer than 2 months. Phase One would net result in a $2000-$3000 payout depending on experience or arrangement made prior to work commencing. (The more fast and proficient the coder, the higher the rate of pay for the less time it takes to complete required tasks and milestones.)

This project can guarantee a degree of fun and prestige, despite the vagueness in description, the founders (coming from acclaimed Harry Potter fansites "MuggleNet and "The Leaky Cauldron") are assured that the idea in its entirety is presently unique. They're looking for someone to help get it off the ground and, ideally, an architect who would stay on an as-needed, contractual basis to keep it running as necessary.

Contact john@essentialhype.com with a resume, portfolio or examples of previous work and references. If lacking any of those, email what you've got and they'll make a decision based on that.

So, as many know, The Leaky Cauldron blog was started by Kevin C Murphy on July 5, 2000 thanks to encouragement of his friend Matt Kingston.

"7/5/00 - Per Matt's suggestion, I've gone ahead and (quickly) thrown together The Leaky Cauldron, a weblog dedicated to the further film and book adventures of Harry Potter. Check it out and, if you'd like to become a contributor, drop me a line."

Kevin was using Blogger at the time and his site was on Geocities before it moved to his own domain.

It took a little research once I heard news that Yahoo! had decided to kill the GeoCities site off to determine the first URL to The Leaky Cauldron, before I moved it over to my personal site at http://www.brain-stream.com and then to http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org (where it resides today -yes, you can blame me for the dashes and full words).

That URL was:

http://www.geocities.com/kevincmurphy/potterblog.html

An original placeholder of the site still exists at Kevin's domain forwarding people over to the main site.

So there's another piece of Potter Fandom History for those who didn't know.

Some of you may remember I ran the Harry Potter Web site The Leaky Cauldron (TLC) for a few years. I am essentially Emeritus at this point. One of the key attributes of TLC was to always go to the source to verify information. A core value I brought with me and current Editorial Director/Webmistress Melissa Anelli bolstered with her long-time experience in publishing and reporting.

Around February 7th, TLC posted confirmation directly from Warner Brothers that actor Gary Oldman would be reprising his role of "Sirius Black" in the next movie - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Then the fun started. Oldman's partner and agent, Douglas Urbanski, began to use the news section of his Web site to dispute Warner Brothers' statements. A new update from Urbanski was posted today:

Today we take the further step of noting that it does not look likely that Mr. Oldman will once again play the role of Sirius Black. For reasons known only to the producers of the Potter film, Mr. Oldman has not been engaged. As we approach the beginning of March we are in the "window of commitments" wherein virtually any job accepted would render Mr. Oldman unavailable for this film. The producers, we presume, are well aware of how this all works. While one does not want to jump to wrong conclusions, there is a growing sense that it was never the intention for them to have Mr. Oldman return.

I find this fascinating and while I know fandoms have been used in the past to encourage the casting of a particular actor in a movie role, I wonder if this is really the first time we've seen this sort of back-and-forth in this large a fandom and this public a forum.