February, 2007

Could ABC’s promotions department kill Lost?

Posted by Evan at 11:12 am

From what I’ve seen the general consensus among Lost fans is that last night’s episode was a big letdown, and I would have to agree. As I thought about the episode I realized that other than what Jack’s tattoo says/means we don’t really know anything we didn’t already know about the show.

What seems to really be upsetting people is how ABC has been promoting each upcoming episode. Each promo is loaded with grandiose statements like “Every will change!�? or to use this previous episode promo as an example “Three major questions will be answered!�? I’m not a marketing expert but I know that you can’t promise that every episode is going to be “the best episode ever�? and expect people to continue to put any stock in your promotions. I know it’s there job to draw viewers to the show each week, but surely they don’t expect their wolf-crying to yield results for an infinite amount of time. The producers of the show have made it clear on a couple of occasions that they don’t usually agree with the spin ABC is putting on the promos, but obviously there’s not much they can do to change things.

So what do you think? Do you think it’s possible that these episode promos are having an ill effect on the show’s overall appeal or more specifically ratings? Do you think people will get tired of the over-the-top promises of the promos when the overall effect of the episode wasn’t quite so significant?

American Idol Phil Stacey

Posted by Evan at 10:02 am

Nearly each year Kristen and I have watched American Idol. It’s not as much a deep interest in pop singers that draws us to the show, but rather it just happens to coincide with a very snowy and cold time of year when we don’t want to be out.

This year is particularly interesting because a friend of a friend is actually in the top 24! Phil Stacey is/was in a band with one of my best friends from high school, Adam (who was the vocalist/guitar player for Unseen). They both went to college together and actually attended the same church. They both ended up in Jacksonville Florida for different reasons where they ended up being members of the same band. Phil and Adam’s roommate both auditioned together but only Phil made it to Hollywood.

Small world.

CSS attribute selectors

Posted by Evan at 10:30 am

Wow. This is quite possibly one of the biggest breakthroughs I’ve made in quite some time. I’ve discovered CSS2 attribute selectors. As you may or may not know there are several ways to apply a CSS style to an element; you can add a class attribute to the element, define a CSS style that effects that particular element (all <b> tags having the same style, for example) and you can also based a style on the ID (id=â€?fooâ€?) of a given element. All of these are great but I’ve ran into cases where I wished that I could apply styles in other ways. Here’s an example.

Let’s say that I want to apply a particular style to any image that has the border attribute set to 1 (border=â€?1â€?). I could setup a class called ‘one_px_border_img’ and apply that to all of the images that have a border, which is how I might have done it before. However, as I’ve discovered, there’s a much more efficient way to do this using attribute selectors. Let’s take a look. Keep Reading…

Starting a new position

Posted by Evan at 4:13 pm

It’s hard to believe, but after over 6 years as web developer at Summersault I’ve accepted a new position. I appreciate so much the skills and abilities that I’ve gained during my time at Summersault and I will truly miss the day-to-day interaction with my co-workers and friends.

My new position is based in Indianapolis where I will be web developer for AuctionFloor.com. I’ll be doing mostly technical HTML and CSS work, which is my bread and butter, and I’ll also be doing some Javascript/AJAX work, which I enjoy a great deal. At least initially I will be working from home most of the time.

It’s a huge change for me and there’s going to be some adjusting that needs done, but it’s going to be a very positive change for us, many new opportunities.

You can read the press release on Summersault’s website.