The Western Iowa Advantage website went "live" (no longer a placeholder) yesterday. I’ve been working on it, along with other people and among other projects, for the past month or so. Everyone at work seems pretty excited about the result. I suspect the enthusiasm is largely due to the visual look of the site. It’s pretty. People like pretty.
But what I find most interesting about the site is something no one else will ever notice: it’s very semantic. The markup describes the data. The news is all hatom, the events are all hcalendar, and the personal and organization information is all hcard. You can run my greasemonkey script and import the events into Google Calendar. You can run the hcards through Brian Suda's X2V and get them into your address book. You can use Chris Casciano's NetNewsWire script to subscribe to the news without bothering with a separate feed (although there is a separate feed too).
And who is going to do these things? I expect absolutely no one. Certainly no one I know of using the site. So why do I bother? I don’t know. I don’t know why I like data so much. I don’t know why people like pretty things so much. Maybe some day I’ll figure it all out. Meanwhile, I make websites.