Name: Alan Taylor
Age: 42
Location: Boston, Mass.
Why We Care: What do you do with a B.A. in English? Alan Taylor taught himself Web development and applied his storytelling skills to create one of The Boston Globe's most popular blogs. In June 2008, Taylor used his own free time to launch The Big Picture photo blog on Boston.com, where he worked as a developer. The Big Picture quickly gained a large following, garnering a SXSW award nomination for Best Blog, as well as praise from PC Magazine and O'Reilly Media.

You're a Web developer in the newspaper industry. You know people are calling it a dying industry, right? How's that treating you?

So far so good. Things are evolving, really. And it's fun to be in the storyteller industry and work in a building where there are five or six trade unions under the same roof.

Did you always know you wanted to be a Web developer?

I had about 30 different jobs growing up. In high school, I had typical food service-type jobs working at places like McDonald's. In college I was a planetarium operator.

Did you save any money from working all of these jobs?

No. I burned through so much money buying nothing in particular. But I had a summer job where I worked in an asphalt testing lab, and it was the first job where I really had a boss who kicked my ass. I would walk in really late because I was under the illusion that no one really noticed. But he did! So I learned to have a good work ethic from him.

What was your first job out of college?

I got a B.A. in English and Philosophy, but right after college, I worked as a tour guide in Anchorage where I drove a tour bus. I'd drive around pointing out the wildlife and tell stories about the city's history. I really loved it.

Why did you stop?

I had been on the road for three years. I was 22 or 23 and didn't have any family commitments. I was putting money in the bank, and by the time I was done giving tours I had about $30,000 or $40,000 saved up. I decided to move to Seattle and write a history book about Alaska and just live off my savings. I was just floored at how quickly my savings ran out when I wasn't making any money.

Is that when you decided to learn programming?

It was all self-taught. I bought this $4,000 Gateway computer and started playing around. The Web was still pretty new then. I survived by taking some menial jobs and borrowed some money from friends. I was in a terrible financial state. Later, I got a job working at a small newspaper and the graphic designer quit. I said, "I know how to do this," and that got my career in Web development started. I worked for a Web boutique that did things for CBS and the NFL, and then I went to work at MSNBC for a few years.

You were doing Web development at a time when it was a new kind of job and people were becoming rich off the Internet. Did you hope you would strike it rich?

Sure. I worked for Drugstore.com when it was fairly new. I watched the stocks shoot up from $18 to $60 and then it dropped to $2. I couldn't help but be disappointed.

How did you get to Boston.com, which is primarily a newspaper company?

I was working at Monster and found it uninspiring. That's when I heard through a friend of a friend at Amazon that they were looking for someone in Boston, and thought, "here's a chance for me to do what I want to do, and maybe go back to telling stories."

What got you to start The Big Picture while you were doing Web development there?

I spent a good amount of time sharing photos with friends on private sites, really just a bunch of goofy images and I would stack them on top of each other. My friends told me, "You idiot, you should do this for your own paper!" We get so many images at the Boston Globe that don't get used, or would get shrunk to accompany an article, so I went to find out if it would be okay to use these images and make them bigger somewhere else. I got an encouraging shrug and told to give it a try. I didn't want to do a "photo of the day," or a photo slideshow. I wanted the photos to be all on one page, so I created some mockups and passed them around. It really took off from there.

What's one of your favorite money-related entries?

I did a "scenes from the recession" post where I tried to piece together photos of homes in decline and people looking for jobs and build a mosaic of the recession. It was really a difficult thing to illustrate.

How about a non-money-related entry?

The one I did on the Iceland volcano eruption. When the media was covering the eruption, everyone was showing photos of people being stranded at airports! I really wanted to show what was actually happening. More recently, I'm proud of the short post I did on the oil spill, which really went public and turned up on all the blogs.

I saw that volcano post. It got 14 million hits! You should ask for a raise.

No, the Globe is under a serious amount of pressure and with problems in the unions, we took pay cuts. I took a pay cut. But I'm living comfortably and still getting paid to do Web development. I like my column and I've built a pretty good audience in two years and still get a big kick out of doing it.

Do you own a nice camera?

I have a cheap camera, and I collect vintage cameras just for fun. But I don't have the innate skill to take amazing photos.

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