Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The official Web site of Iowa state government got a new look today, marking what was its first major overhaul in five years.
Malcolm Huston, who manages IOWAccess, the advisory council responsible for overseeing the redesign, explained his goals in a statement:
The Web site should reflect Iowa’s welcoming and forward-thinking nature, and we think the new site does that with things like photos of Iowa, easy access to a lot of information, and the ability to share the site through other networking Web sites. We tried to make the site more social, as opposed to the usual ‘formal’ government Web sites citizens often visit.
Keep reading for a very geeky rundown of the new site.
The new Iowa.gov (Screen capture: June 23, 2009)
The new Iowa.gov makes more extensive use of Javascript — a technology for animating and dynamically changing the contents of Web pages after they have been loaded — than its predecessor. That will make for improved browsing experiences for most Internet users — especially those with modern browsers and broadband connections — but those with slower connections and older browsers might find all of the site’s new moving parts more cumbersome.
Developers chose to use the open-source Javascript framework called JQuery, which speeds up the process of writing code but also means visitors have to download fairly large library files when they visit the site for the first time.
The new site improves its compliance with newer standards of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), avoiding as many table-style layouts in favor of Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) layouts that use “div” tags and unordered lists. (There is still one pesky table in the layout, which I think could have been replaced with CSS fairly easily, but I digress…)
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C)’s authoritative “Markup Validation Service” deems the front page invalid, but designing a Web site that is accessible to a wide range of people often requires invalid markup (as counterintuitive as that sounds, it’s true).
The total size of the front page, including images, Javascript libraries, and other files, comes in at just under 590 kilobytes. That is heftier than the old Iowa.gov (which may mean slightly increased bandwidth costs for state government), but it remains much more lightweight than some other state Web sites that have been redesigned recently. For instance, Utah.gov clocks in at more than 3.5 megabytes (nearly seven times the size of Iowa.gov) once all of it has loaded.
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