Technically Philly now easier to reach than your mama’s kitchen

Excuse this brief station message.

We heard the suggestion and went shopping. So you can now reach Technically Philly by our Twitter handle, TechnicallyPHL.com, and, if you’re way lazy, you can also now use TPhilly.com.

Get at us:

• TechnicallyPhilly.com
• TechnicallyPHL.com
• TPhilly.com

And while you’re at it, get an RSS subscription here, follow us on Twitter here and learn about reading us on your mobile device uninhibitedly here.

This domain addition was spurred on by some advice from the community. We’re better for it. So, if you have any advice — even a half-baked idea — let us know about it by dropping a line here.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Blue Cadet Web design firm nominated for two Webby Awards

Annesha Taylor has short hair and is seated with a bright floral dress.

She’s speaking into a camera about her first reaction to finding she had become one of the 28,000 HIV-positive people living in tropical Jamaica.

“How was I going to tell my mother? The best way,” she pauses there, “is if I killed myself.”

It’s unsettling in all the worst ways. But it’s also a way to personalize the AIDS struggle on the Caribbean island, which now has one of the highest rates in the world outside the African continent.

Partnering with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and D.C.-based Joshua Cogan, design firm bluecadet interactive, newly based in the loathsomely-named Art Museum area, helped tell the stories of Taylor and others and package them on Live Hope Love.

They hope to have helped bring attention to the ongoing battle, led by South Carolina poet, activist and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes. While surely not they’re only end goal, bluecadet has won praise and honors.

Add another: bluecadet interactive was nominated for two Webby Awards, winning a People’s Voice nod in one, the company announced late last month.

See what got them the win, how bluecadet got the work and what’s up next, after the jump.

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Shop Talk: Philadelphia Weekly redesign with Keith McGinnis of Review Publishing

Update amended: 8:50 p.m. 4/19/09

From time to time in the recent past, one of the most trafficked Web sites in Philadelphia has gotten a major redesign.

Unfortunately, there was never one source that covered the whys and the hows. Now there is: Technically Philly.

So, here’s the first in an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

Both of Philadelphia’s big alternative-weeklies have changed their online looks in recent months. It just so happens that the one that came out last may have started first.

At the end December, CityPaper, founded in 1981 by Bruce Schimmel, went from this to this. And then, early last month, Philadelphia Weekly made its own jump from a cluttered display.

“We knew we needed to step up our platform online, not just re-skin the site,” says Keith McGinnis, the IT Web head over at Review Publishing, PW’s Samson Street-based parent company. “Now we have a platform that can help us rise to the occasion.”

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Solve the Philadelphia budget crisis online

Somebody please figure out this city’s budget shortfall so we can go back to prospering.

It can be Mayor Michael Nutter or city council or, Hell, maybe Larry West.

Maybe you can figure it out with a new, very cool online toy from the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, the research and analysis nonprofit based on the Avenue of the Arts.

At EconomyLeague.com/Budget, users get a snapshot of the budget battle, by having to close a $200 million hole with 15 options.

“Through the Philadelphia Budget Challenge as well as the Mayor’s budget forums in February, citizens are getting a look behind the curtain at the real trade-offs city managers have to make,” said Allison Kelsey, a spokeswoman for the Economy League. “It makes for better-informed constituents and voters who can then be better advocates for themselves, their neighborhoods and their city.”

See what went into the project, read how I fared and share your own choices below.

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