Last week we helped the Pratt Center launch a new blog called The Eminent Domain. From the site:

This website is a news, information and networking resource for New Yorkers working to influence the shape of their neighborhoods and make sure that development is an asset to their communities, not a force for displacement and destruction.

The site is built on WordPress, which serves as a simple content management system as well as a blogging platform: in addition to publishing blog posts about NY neighborhood development, the writers can manage the site’s pages and administer the site from WP’s administration area. It’s a powerful tool and we look forward to seeing The Eminent Domain’s contributors use it to promote just and equitable development in NYC.

Check out the site at theeminentdomain.org.

Asi Burak of ImpactGames was interviewed on Fox News recently. He does really well with the few minutes he’s given, eloquently and humbly representing the game as it relates to the larger conflict.

Check out the blog post on peacemakergame.com, and the video on youtube.

We’re proud to continue supporting the online presence for ImpactGames and PeaceMaker.

We worked with Parker Dockray to rebuild the Women’s Health Rights Coalition web site back when she was executive director there, and we’re proud to have just finished a site for the organization she joined recently, the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom.

The new CCRF site is a lean, clean online “brochure” to replace the organization’s previous broken placeholder page. The code is easy to follow, and Parker’s stepping up to the plate (again) to do her own manual maintenance of the site.

Rhys and I are grateful that we can do creative work and provide simple, powerful tools for organizations like CCRF, to help them continue their own great work.

As more and more of our clients and partners want dynamic web sites and the ability to update their own site content, we’ve been doing a ton of development with Drupal (content management platform) and WordPress (blogging platform), including four such projects under active development presently. (Stay tuned for details!)

This has meant bigger projects, and more collaboration with colleagues. To manage these complex software packages, we’re turning more and more to version control systems, which let us track all of our development in a thorough way, manage software patches and upgrades easily, and “roll back” to previous versions if there are any problems.

With WordPress, the switch to version control has been a breeze, and has let us manage WordPress’ regular software updates for clients much quicker than we previously could.

With Drupal, it’s a bit more of a challenge due to Drupal’s complexity and the huge number of configuration changes that are made through the administrative interface and stored in the database. But version control has still been essential to let us test and deploy Drupal in a sane way.

What does this mean for you? Version control gives us an efficient way to administer more dynamic web sites, meaning a smoother and less costly development and maintenance process. So if we’ve built you a static web site in the past, let us know if you think WordPress or Drupal might make sense for you. And if you know anyone looking for a dynamic web site or content management system, send them our way!

Times change. The seasons come and go. After many years, Rhys and I are sick of being “geographically-tied”, so we’re dropping the “dtekeast” and “dtekwest” monikers. (And it looks like we’ve got some geographic changes upcoming, anyway…)

So for now — and we know this is revolutionary — we’ll refer to ourselves simply as “Andy” and “Rhys”. Our email addresses will change accordingly.