Odds & Sods

Good news, the "toothpick in the cake" line has been removed from the ePrize "Careers Page." Glad that cooler heads have provided some fairly well-written job descriptions.

In other news, I hear that there's a harrowing TV commercial on the air featuring Michigan native Jeff Daniels touting the benefits of Michigan businesses. The commercial also stars ePrizer Alesya Opelt. I have yet to see the spot but have been told that "once you see it, you'll be scarred for life." I'm hoping that this makes an appearance on the ePrize Blog soon!

And, a fond adieu to the big group of Quality Assurance staff that were let go recently. Maybe this explains the existence of some broken links and items that otherwise should have been caught... (Psst, lots of broken links on the "In The News" page of the site -- 9/10/2007 CNNMoney.com, 8/4/2007 Detroit News, 7/31/2007 Detroit Free Press, etc). I'm sure everyone that was canned so gracefully will land on their feet. They're always a need for quality assurance.

The Wonderful World of Javascript

It's with great fun and a small amount of irony that developers utilize javascript like it's going out of style at my current place of employment.

While javascript was used for some rudimentary form manipulation here and there at ePrize during my tenure there, any and all "heavy lifting" was done via the back end "toybox" framework. Whenever anything more was being asked of a front-end script the immediate hue and cry from the crowd was, "What about users who have Javascript turned off?!?" This may be a valid argument... or not. There was little-to-no metrics support of our sites at the time, especially in regard to javascript/ECMAscript acceptance. This eliminated all options for AJAX, et cetera.

Ironically, this would also have eliminated the "brilliant" "vision" of some who proposed much more "robust" javascript usage (basically, using MooTools) which was to "revolutionize" the interfaces of ePrize promotions. These were to be the "sizzle on the steak," as our PR person would say ad nauseum. So, which is it? Javascript or not?

Going through the promotions that are currently live, I see little-to-no sizzle and a lot of gristle. For example; pulling up the first promotion I caught on ePrize.com (your favicon has gone missing), Scott® Common Sense Community Spook-tacular Halloween Sweepstakes, I would certainly think that the jack o' lantern so prominently displayed on screen would have a little candle glow associated with it. Animated gif, simple swf animation, something to make it shine (pun intended) just a little. If the argument comes back, "There's not enough time to do that," then welcome to my world circa every day during my tenure at ePrize. Those kind of things are "nice to haves" and not the kind of snazzy stuff that the sweatshop mentality/workload allows.

Competition Coming?

Good news, folks. Looks like there's some healthy competition coming to Detroit for ePrize. Looks like Slither can be retired as a new player enters the arena.

Get those resumes ready.