The Expert Mind Ross

'Hunger Games' VMA Teaser 'Epic,' Experts Say

Given the excitement surrounding our exclusive look at footage of the big-screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins' beloved dystopian bestseller, MTV News sought out three "Hunger Games" experts to get their reactions to seeing Katniss' survival skills first-hand.

"That was epic," gushed Samus Belle of fan site Sparks Will Fly . "I'm so excited. Especially seeing Jennifer Lawrence running through the whole arena, she looked like a hunter," Belle said. "She just captured Katniss onscreen."

Kimmy West, of Mockingjay.net agreed with Belle on Lawrence's spot-on portrayal: "Jennifer Lawrence is just embodying Katniss," West said. "The big trait about Katniss is that she's animalistic when she hunts. You can totally tell that she's been training so much for that shot," West explained of seeing Lawrence wield a bow and fire an arrow in the clip. "She really looks like a pro."

Our experts were so delighted to see Lawrence assume pole position in the teaser, they didn't mind not getting to see male leads Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) in action. Hemsworth's voice can be heard throughout the footage, however, offering Katniss words of encouragement that echo in her mind as she's running for her life.

"I think they maybe want to wait a little bit longer on [showing] Peeta to build up the excitement even more," said Arianna Ruiz of Down With the Capitol . "And Gale is still a very important part of Katniss' life."

"Basically, [Gale] is saying, 'You know how to hunt,' 'All they want is a good show,' 'Show them how good you are,' " West said, summarizing the voiceover. "I feel like it's a really good message to send across for the trailer because it's showing she's not a career tribute," she explained of the story's highly trained expert contestants. "She's not someone who wants to kill anyone; she's just wants to live after this."

Belle speculated about when fan favorite Peeta might appear in the film's marketing campaign: "I'm a Peeta fan, but I think they will put him somewhere during the trailers because half the 'Hunger Games' fandom probably wants him in there at some point.

10 ... - BrandonBeeks.com - Ecommerce, Design, Marketing, and Code

Me and my good friend Chase (ChaseSagum.com) recently completed a new e-commerce project for painting screen home theater. We originally built the site on WordPress, but soon realized that we needed to service the wide range Magento platform has to offer. Our biggest concern with Magento is its notorious problems with page load times. Here are some tips we used to reduce our load time and record some tracks. Hopefully they can do the same for you.

This was one of the key factors to reduce our load times. We started out on Bluehost and decided to switch to Media Temple because of their grid-hosting service. It’s fairly cheap at $20/month. This was the first change that we made and we immediately noticed a difference. I imagine once we upgrade to a dedicated server we’ll see another spike in performance. Its amazing what good hosting can do.

This one sucks to do, but is worth the time and effort. Ideally you want to build your template on a barebones template like Yoast’s SEO Template . We realized this a little too late and instead had to clean up our existing template.To do this, you want to do a few things: 1) Delete all the code that you will not use or can not do without. This includes all the features that jQuery can be "cool", but do not add real value to your site. 2) Clean your CSS files. This includes the combination of all files in a single CSS file and removing all classes, ids, and styles that are double-products of bad coding. 3) Depending on how the model is coded, you may need to go and rewrite some code. If you do not have the expertise to do this, find a local front-end coder who is willing to do an audit of your code.

This is a simple one. Go to System > Configuration > Advanced. There you will see a list of Modules running on your site. Go through and disable any modules that you aren’t currently using or won’t ever use. Even if you plan on using a module in the future, turn it off until you actually do use it. You also want to turn off the built in Magento reporting and use Google Analytics. You’ll get much better, and in depth data with Google Analytics. Here are the modules we currently have turned off on ScreenPaintHd.

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