Archive for March 2011
New govt IT strategy published
The new Government ICT Strategy has been published on the Cabinet Office website - and to their great credit, it's been published: primarily for web consumption, with the downloadable versions a click deeper; and not just in PDF, not just in Word format, but also in OpenOffice format! The quiet symbolism is noted. Much of [...] read on »
Early glimpses of Alphagov
If you're interested in where the Alphagov project is going - and if you're reading this, you probably are - then it's worth keeping an eye on the Dribbble account of Paul Annett (@nicepaul) - formerly of ClearLeft, now SuperniceStudio. If you haven't come across it, Dribbble is a social network for designers to share [...] read on »
Loosemore leads Lane Fox vision work
Confirmation on the Cabinet Office's blog of something that's been known within the Whitehall webby world for a little while now: Tom Loosemore (ex BBC, Channel 4, Ofcom, Show Us A Better Way, etc etc) has been 'asked' to put together an 'alpha' version of what a Single Government Domain website, as proposed by Martha [...] read on »
Getting down to business
A couple of potentially interesting launches today. First came Start Up Britain, which offers an unusual proposition: 'helping Britain's future entrepreneurial talent by providing links to the web's best business resources, along with offers from some of the biggest brands in the country'. You're greeted at the top of the homepage, somewhat surprisingly, by a [...] read on »
Transport closes Code of Everand
You may remember my little exclusive from the start of the year, about the £2.7 million spent by the Department for Transport on its online role playing game, Code of Everand. My FOI request also revealed that usage had basically flatlined since April 2010. So it doesn't come as a huge surprise to learn that [...] read on »
Testing HMRC’s open source claims
The subject of open source came up at this morning's Public Administration Select Committee hearing with (among others) new government CIO Joe Harley. You can watch it at the ParliamentLive.tv website, if you're so inclined. I had it on in the background, and my ears pricked up when I heard HMRC CIO Phil Pavitt make [...] read on »
Martha’s vision taking shape
[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/Marthalanefox/status/47206064797659136"] Monday saw a meeting of the ministerial working group tasked with considering Martha Lane Fox's vision of a 'single domain based on agile web shared web services'... resulting, as I understand it, in across-the-board approval. So it's with commendable speed that just two days later - to prevent me revealing it first?! - [...] read on »
Conceived in Greater Manchester
The Automattic gang have produced special t-shirts for the SXSW festival, declaring WordPress's birthplace to be the festival's host state of Texas. Which is nice, except that it's not entirely accurate. As regular readers will know, the WordPress project was started by two people: Matt Mullenweg and our own Mike Little. And whilst Matt may [...] read on »
Cabinet Office’s open standards survey
With some unexpected free time in my schedule for today, I sat down to complete the Cabinet Office's recently published questionnaire on Open Standards in government. To be perfectly frank, its 120 questions have left me reeling, and nervous. Screen after screen of acronyms and document reference numbers - ISO this, BSI that, W3C whatever [...] read on »
Say goodbye to IE6, urges Microsoft site
Internet Explorer v6 is the bane of any web developer's life. You can build a web page, and it'll look beautiful in every other browser - but then you look at it in IE6, and it's a mess. Without getting too technical, IE6 interprets the web's CSS design code in ways which are irrational, unexpected, [...] read on »