ImpactGames, creator of PeaceMaker, recently launched a new interactive news gaming platform at playthenewsgame.com. The concept is that short interactive games are published often to the site, based on the latest major news events. Anyone can register for the site and “play” any of these news items by suggesting appropriate actions to be taken and predicting outcomes. Players interact with each other via game rankings and statistics, and discussions of the games.

Games can also be syndicated and embedded on your own web site or blog. Here’s the game that’s currently featured:

So far, we’ve just consulted with ImpactGames on specific aspects of the web site and user interface, but we hope to be more involved in future improvements to the platform.

Play the News is another innovative and gutsy project from the ImpactGames folks… Try it out!

[EDIT: changed the syndicated game to the one that's currently featured...]

Last fall we mentioned that there were some geographic changes on the way, and here they are… As of this summer, I’ll be heading to the east coast and joining Rhys in Brooklyn!

For our Seattle-based coworkers, colleagues, and clients, I’m sorry we won’t be able to meet face to face too often anymore, but we don’t anticipate any other changes to our working relationship. If you have any concerns or questions about this move, please get in touch.

I’m excited to be joining physical forces with Rhys again after many years of living and working 2000 miles apart. It’ll be great to be geographically closer to some of our clients in New York, too.

This will mean some down time for me this summer — mostly during the month of June. We’ve already been discussing this with clients we’re actively working with. For anyone else who knows they’ll need work completed around that time, please let us know.

Wish me luck!

Standardista and web development community leader Molly Holzschlag pointed me to the “very awesome iJustine”, who posted this hilarious rap by m0serious about standards-based web design. User interface tips, semantics, accessibility — it’s all there! Perfect for nerds and gangsters alike… Molly and iJustine’s posts are complete with transcript, so educate yourself

We built a simple web site for the New Mexico Rural Water Association (NMRWA) 5 years ago, and their tech-savvy staff has maintained the site content on their own ever since. The layout and code had started to show its age, though, so NMRWA recently hired us to revamp the site.

The new site is more responsive to the preferences of site visitors (it expands with the browser window, any modern browser can change the font sizes, etc), and is vastly improved under the hood (page semantics, accessibility, search-engine-optimization). The site integrates a phpBB-based forum, with simple theming to tie it in to the look and feel rest of the site.

NMRWA continues to maintain the site content, but now they’ve got a modern framework to build on! As always, we take it as the highest compliment that we’re able to maintain such long-term relationships with our clients.

Visit the new NMRWA site at nmrwa.org.

Web browser drama!

Microsoft is still reeling in the web browser market from its own five-year failure to update Internet Explorer before version 7 last year. After being poised to continue their arrogant imperial approach to said market with a new proposal called “version targeting“, I’m thrilled to see they’ve changed course and will now heed the wishes of the greater web development community.

Version targeting is the idea that web sites should explicitly specify which version of the browser they’d like to use, and Microsoft was going to require web sites to “opt-in” to using the latest version of Internet Explorer every time a new version of the browser was released in the future. (If they didn’t, even IE99 would still show the web site exactly like IE7 did!) This proposal is a reaction to the trouble they created by fixing many of their own bugs with the release of Internet Explorer 7, and it would be a sea-change for web development: moving away from the convergence on web standards and the idea of progressive enhancement, back to the use of specific bits of code dictated by browser vendors from the top down for their one particular browser.

The version targeting proposal and explicit opt-in requirement has created a huge upswelling of comment and debate in the web development community, and while 99% of “blue collar” web developers like me seemed opposed to the idea, I was disappointed to see so many rockstar standardistas coming out apologetically in favor. Many thanks to Jeremy Keith, who took a strong stand against the idea in a recent article on A List Apart. Jeremy wrote:

The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of "breaking the web" in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches.

Well, as of yesterday, Microsoft has changed course and said that while their new version targeting scheme will remain intact, web sites will no longer have to explicitly opt-in! IE will continue to adhere to web standards as best it can by default, and the onus to “version target” will be on developers who explicitly want to use an old version of IE. This is great news.

Workers of the web unite! And kudos to Microsoft. It’s excellent to see them listening, and working with the greater community.