blog archive.

I've just checked the News and have become aware of our new Olympic mascots "Wenlock" and "Mandeville", my first thoughts were "what the heck are those things" but after watching a rather entertaining animation of their creation, i started to realise that they aren't that bad, I mean even if you hate them, you should take pride in what's representing our great country. For once everyone should have some national pride!

Our guest blogger - Mr P. D - work experience student.

"The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win" (Sir Roger Bannister)

Well thanks Roger, we weren't in it to win it but it certainly was painful. The Focus team have succesfully completed the much anticipated Bristol 10km race. Paul and Duncan have been pounding the streets for the last 2 months in preparation for the big race and it was well worth it. The guys were joined by almost 9000 other runners dressed in an array of outfits from Scooby Doo to flamingos and even a man dressed in a suit smoking a pipe.

The event was brilliant, well organised and great fun. Well done Bristol!! I think there may be talk in the office of a half Marathon next!

Today sees the launch of Portsmouth City Council's Play in Portsmouth website, to showcase play areas and adventure playgrounds across the city, funded through the Government’s Play Pathfinder project.

It was a great project to work on, and the site really reflects the principles of ‘play’; that it should be bright, fun and inclusive. Having worked on similar projects for Bristol City Council (Go Places To Play), we were in a really good position to understand their requirements and use our experience to deliver a site that not only looks great, but does everything it needs to.

One of the tenets throughout the project has been that: “Play is one of the defining characteristics of a good childhood and all children and young people have a right to play.” Judging by some of the big kids we have in our office, I’m not sure I’d limit it to just children and young people! Web developers like to play, too... 

In case you hadn't noticed, today (6th May) is polling day in the UK and we decided to do our own exit poll in another random attempt to see who will be in number 10 tomorrow.

However, we decided not to use the usual method of asking people who they will vote for, we decided to base our poll on whether the home page (ignoring any 'vote today' splash pages) of each party's web site validated against W3C standards. Yes, probably truly geeky. But relevant in a twisted sort of way, seeing as new media and such is seen as the new way to shout politics.

So, how did the big parties fare? Well.....
 - Lib Dems: failed with 1 error. (although they are the only ones to have declared against XHTML Strict - obviously.....)
 - UKIP: another failure, 10 errors and 2 warnings. Bad news for Mr Farage.
 - Green Party: 39 errors. Environmentally friendly, but not particularly accessible.
 - Conservatives: passed! Although there was one warning.
 - Labour. Oh dear. It looks like Gordon is in for a tough night - an incredible 286 errors and 45 warnings.   

So rounding up in true Paxman style, looks like Labour need to give us a call about getting their web site sorted.

Happy voting.