I know, a more clever person would be able to dummy up some ideas for their site redesign without actually implementing those changes in a production environment.

Sadly, I’m not that person.

I’m going to play with this for the next couple days, bear with me, you might see some horrifying things on these pages. I’ll do my best to make a decision soon.

We could call this a beta, but that would be disingenuous. Mostly I’ll just hack around until I’ve decided I’m done.

Comments are welcome, though they may not be heeded. No accounting for taste, as it were.

And we’re back. Again.

It is with great joyous fanfare that I officially declare the end of the BountyBowl offseason! It’s Draft Week, and it’s time to rejoin our blathering brethren on the great InterWebs!

What have I been up to this past month? Oh, the usual. Slow-cooking pork (see above, and it was tasty). Getting sunburned for no good reason. Earning Continental OnePass miles. Rooting on the other Philly teams. Looking for an opportunity to spit on David Stern and Clay Bennett. Pretty standard, really. Couldn’t really get excited about NFL-related blogging, if only because so very little has been going on (sort of). Still, with the schedule last week, the Mike Patterson plea, the ongoing Lito Sheppard stuff, and the draft this weekend, well, it’s time to turn this action back on. (Read the rest of this story.)

It’s 11:30 at night, I’m flipping around on the TV and settle on Sportscenter, which is showing cool Darren McFadden footage.  Then, looking up from a magazine on the other end of the couch in the most interested and friendly of tones:

“Oh, is the draft this weekend?”

“No.”

“When is it?”

“Like a month.”

“Oh.”

[Beat.  Eyes return to magazine.]

“Whatever, I had to sit through the season premier of The Hills earlier.”

(Just think of how much worse it would be if I still had NFL Network.  I’mjustsayinizall.)

I suppose a more intrepid reporter may have posted a Gone Fishin sign on the site a couple weeks back. Sorry about that — we’ve been dark with no explanation since the day after the most recent unpleasantness in my long and storied career as an Eagles (that would be the day after the effing Giants won the effing Super Bowl).

But now we’re back. Ever so briefly. At least long enough for a quick update on the content plan for the site (as well as some other big changes for me). Here we go:

Why We’ve Been Dark, Part 1: the obvious answer here is that it’s the only three weeks of non-activity in the NFL calendar: the Pro Bowl is useless, teams are limited in the moves they can make, there’s no draft yet, even the media schedule backs off a bit. So it’s a good time to take a break. And by “take a break” I mean “try to spend my free time consuming non-football media/ see the precious light of day on Sundays.”  Still, I’ve been good about the del.icio.us (those are the links over there on the right).  So I’m not completely absent.

Why We’ve Been Dark, Part 2: my actual big news is that I’m moving back to the East Coast one week from today. The movers come Tuesday, my car gets scooped up Friday, and then I have a one-way ticket to the East Coast on the redeye Friday night. As you might imagine, it’s been a busy couple weeks with many many moving parts. The personal life triage has forced me to prioritize “getting my sh*t together ahead of the cross-country move” over “chasing down Eagles non-stories like imaginary Lito Sheppard trades and Dunavin rumors.” It’s a cruel world sometimes.  Still, I shall miss my current home (would you look at that view above?) — Seattle’s been very very good to me.  Sigh. 
(Read the rest of this story.)

Looks like somebody from PhiladelphiaEagles.com was working late last night!

Careful readers may have noticed a fresh image of Donovan McNabb celebrating the Reggie Brown TD inserted into the page-top header. Hmmm.

Note that Dunavin made a big point of saying that he was not trying to mock a certain former teammate with this celebration, but was instead “thanking the Man upstairs.”

Got it.

(Also, nice work from the web site staff sucking up to Dunavin.)

“One morning, over at Elizabeth’s beach house, she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer THAT question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.”

Yeah, that about sums up where I am with the Birds right now: not only do I not want to talk about losing the Giants ahead of the inevitable humiliation at the hands of the Cowboys this Sunday, but I don’t really want to talk about the Eagles or professional football at all.

I’m not just frustrated as a fan. That I’ve been before. Now I’m bored as well. I’m not even interested in getting cheesed off about it today. Today they can suck and I don’t really care.

(Read the rest of this story.)

Landed from the UK about two hours ago. The mobile phone doesn’t work overseas, and I hadn’t checked messages.

I had 17 text messages waiting for me. Every single one of them was from Sunday night.

I think that says a lot in a lot of different dimensions. For now I’ll try not to focus on the part where people only get in touch with me when the Eagles are playing well and say that the game must have been one entertaining TV show.

No Birds game for me tonight. Like many folks this Sunday, I’ll be 35,000 feet in the sky in an aluminum tube for the entirety of the football game. But insead of heading home to C@L (I’ve been in Philly for the past week), I’m actually headed in the other direction, and will land tomorrow morning in London very confused/ bleary-eyed and eager to check an Eagles score.

I assume that I will find said score tremendously disappointing.

Still, crazier things have happened, and as Sheldon Brown reminded us earlier this week, football is a violent game, and things can happen. We shall see. Essentially, I’m looking for a compelling reason to hand Yahoo $25 to watch the replay of the game on my puter (this is how I watched the Redskins game earlier this year; service only available outside North America!). My current plan: if they cover, I watch; if they don’t, I might wait to check it out on the DVR upon my return to the Left Coast on Friday.

Now I head to my gate and a likely airplane nap, in which visions of a surprise Eagles upset will dance in my head.

Go Birds.

Good news for all the out-of-market Eagles fans (like me): Redlasso is back and running on the Eagles’ site.

Redlasso is this nifty little service that collects a bunch of Eagles-related videos from the local and national TV press (CN8, Daily News Live, the local network affiliates, and ESPN) and publishes them as web video. I don’t see much of an ad model, and I’m not sure how they’re paying for this stuff, but hey, it’s a bubble and we should all enjoy it. Viva the Electric Internets!

Personally, I was a little worried Redlasso’s future with the Eagles when the Birds’ site pulled down the links as part of the resdesign. Guess that was just a bump in the road. This is a killer service and I’m psyched it’s back.  Essentially, Redlasso means I can watch 15 minutes of Eagles video content every single day.  Future of content distribution, it’s great to meet you!

Link:
Redlasso On PhiladelphiaEagles.com
Redlasso Home Page

After a fair amount of fiddling with the design of the site, including-but-not-limited-to fooling around with the fonts, graphics and ads, I think it’s safe to say that BountyBowl is now officially in beta.

That’s right. Beta. BETA.

This just means that the design part of the setup is pretty complete. I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it a bit more, but I think this is pretty much what the site will look like for the next couple months (as a general rule: expect more ads, not fewer ads).

I think the beta thing goes well with the fact that we are now four (4) days away from the start of training camp. The goal is to have our “official” launch on Friday, to coincide with training camp. We’re currently “on track” for said launch.

Go Birds. More soon.