Comments on: An MP's guide to blogs

By: MPs websites - politics on the rates? « Local Democracy

MPs websites - politics on the rates? « Local Democracy — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:22:21 +0000

[...] Puffbox and Spartakan are chewing over the fact that Labour MP Paul Flynn has had his parliamentary [...]

By: Jon Worth

Jon Worth — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:58:46 +0000

Agh, hell. I've just looked at the rest of those nominated sites... How did Alan Johnson and Kerry McCarthy make it into the top 4?

By: Jon Worth

Jon Worth — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:57:19 +0000

Agree with all of this. It's not as if MPs are so hard up that they can't fork out £50 or so for their own, hosted Wordpress installation. There is a problem with the Comms allowance... Clearly Paul Flynn was over the top in what he wrote, but some of the rules are a bit strange. You cannot, for example, have a party logo on the part of the site that someone views when they first open the page (means John Hutton is in breach I think), and there are also some very strange rules about where and how you can link to external sites. The essential point is this: the Comms allowance rules try to draw a straight line through the very grey area of where party political and parliamentarian communications overlap, and it's always going to be a mess.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:26:47 +0000

Blogger.com should not be used, or at least not in its default configuration. It has bugs that block comments by the disabled, the security-conscious, the energy-saving and probably others, while I think it's also outside the reach of the Data Protection Act and so on, isn't it?

Those MP Website Awards make me think that BCS wouldn't know a good website if it sat on them. Of those four, only alanjohnson.org comes close to meeting basic accessibility requirements - and I didn't see a blog on that one...