DNS: the final battleground (or 'how can it cost £14,000 to edit a line of text?')

I think we’re all agreed that government departments outsourcing everything computer-related in one single contract was a mistake. A bit like, say, outsourcing your press office to BT because they spend most of their time working with phones.
Where it might well have made sense to contract out your IT infrastructure – you know, putting PCs on desks, servers in data centres, wiring them all up, that sort of thing – it certainly didn’t help either side, frankly, to lump web development in there too. Tensions inevitably arise; and in my line of work, I tend to see and experience it more than most.
Which is why I read Dan Harrison’s latest blog post with a certain air of resignation.

A single-source model sounds wonderful. There’s never any doubt as to who to go to when you have a problem or indeed a requirement. But the problem is that this comes at a price. … And for this reason, prices go up. I heard only the other day of a large IT provider charging £28,000 (twenty-eight thousand pounds) to make two DNS changes on behalf of a Department. No matter how you do the maths, it’s incomprehensible to get anywhere close to this number in a rational world.

Sadly, it comes as no surprise. DNS is where the infrastructure Goliath finally comes face to face with David (or more likely, Dave), the agile web developer. Dave has just built a microsite, or rebuilt the corporate website, and wants to point a department.gov.uk address at it. That means he has to deal with Goliath, the uber-sysadmin who owns the DNS table.
DNS retains an unjustifiable air of mystery. It’s ultimately just a text file, which you edit like any other. You add a new line, containing the name of the new server, whether real or virtual, and the IP address to which traffic should be directed. And that’s pretty much it. The information gets cached around the internet, for a time period which you can specify (‘ttl’ – time to live) – whence arises the mythology about DNS changes taking up to 48 hours to replicate. You do need to be careful; it’s entirely possible that a single character out of place could bork your organisation’s websites, email, everything for a day or two. But it isn’t rocket science.
By definition, it’s the last job on any given project. You start by locating the right person to speak to – usually quite tricky, as DNS edits don’t need to happen very often. That person needs to be bothered to listen to you: not always a given. There’s almost certainly a procedure for making the request. There’s then almost certainly a procedure for considering the request. The job then has to be ‘booked in’ – yes, the job of editing a single line of text. And then, some time later, comes the bill – including the salaries of all those people whose job wasn’t the actual editing of the actual text file, plus the outsourced provider’s markup, of course.
And yes, if you were the single-source IT provider, and you wanted to make it difficult – and ultimately more expensive – to bring in cheaper SME suppliers to do web development work, this would be one way you might do so. Not that I’m suggesting that’s why it happens.
But it’s hard to blame the many organisations who sneak off to register sneaky little .co.uk domains in the commercial marketplace. They can pay someone like 123-reg just £2.99 per year (ex VAT)… and not only does this give them their new domain within a matter of minutes, it’s a domain they have hands-on control of, through 123-reg’s (very straightforward) online interface. It’s the wrong thing to do, for numerous reasons – except that (a) it gets the job done, and (b) the taxpayer saves, looking at Dan’s specific case, something in the region of £13,996.
So… a Single Domain for government, anyone?

Multisite mania: the next phase of our WordPress work for Defra


Late last year, Puffbox helped Defra move its main corporate website over to WordPress. One of the grand concepts underpinning the project was the use of WordPress’s multisite (formerly MU) functionality, allowing us to run multiple websites using the same installation. We launched with only one child site, for News – probably the easiest one, at that. But straight away, we began making much more ambitious plans.
Like everywhere around Whitehall, the start of a new tax year was to bring various contractual and organisational changes at Defra: and it was set as our deadline for the next phase of work, spinning off many more child sites. The good news is, all went well, and they’re now managing 20 distinct sites through the same WordPress installation – some carrying their own identities, some nested deep (and hopefully seamlessly) within the Defra design.
The first task was to rebuild the output themes from scratch – yes, already. For the initial launch, we had simply dropped WordPress code into Defra’s existing Dreamweaver-based output templates, and grafted some additional CSS on to their existing stylesheets, which were already in need of a good clear-out. They were never going to be able to support a platform consisting of literally dozens of child sites.
We now render the pages using something akin to a multi-level theme framework:

  • Every site is built on the ‘base’ theme, which defines the layout, and the bulk of the functionality, but has no imagery or colours attached to it. This theme is effectively hidden on the platform, and will never be used directly.
  • There’s then a corporate (‘root’) theme, a child theme of ‘base’ in WP terms, which adds the departmental colour scheme and logo. This theme is used by the top-level site, which contains most of the corporate information. It adds a custom template for the top-level homepage, but that’s about it.
  • We then have a number of further Defra-branded child themes, defined as children of the ‘base’ theme, but also referencing the ‘root’ stylesheet for colour and branding. Depending on functionality, there may be additional templates or functions: so for example, the News theme/site has its own homepage, and the theme used by the Publications and Statistics sites has its own approach to presenting attached files.
  • Finally, there’s a ‘custom’ theme for use by sites within the extended Defra family. This uses the same ‘base’ theme for layout; but includes additional WordPress functionality – mostly built-in, if you know where to look – to customise the branding and colour palette via the admin interface. Upload a logo, choose two colours, and bingo – a unique child site, which still retains the basic house style, maintains its connections to the wider Defra network, but whose management can be devolved to an arms-length business unit. Everyone’s a winner.

Needless to say, there are countless custom functions behind the scenes to stitch it all together – simple things like forcing a particular sitewide tab to be highlighted, to make a child site seem like it’s within a particular branch of the corporate site. (Although actually, that one wasn’t simple at all.)
And there are one or two new custom plugins which add pretty significant functionality, including one to implement a site-wide shared taxonomy. This has the potential to automatically surface related items across the network, and is pretty exciting – although we won’t see its benefits for some time.
As you can imagine, moving such a large quantity of material into such a radically different publishing model has frequently been challenging. We’re still finding our feet in certain areas, and it goes without saying, we’re pushing WordPress harder than ever. A few glitches here and there are inevitable; but we’ve had nothing too catastrophic. With a proper staging environment now in place, all our code being managed through Subversion, and a WordPress-based bug tracker to log any issues, it’s all gone relatively smoothly.
I can’t say enough about the contributions from Simon Wheatley and Team Defra; my front-end work was completed pretty early on, and I’ve really just been a spectator whilst the serious lifting and shifting has been happening. But once again, the Defra guys have been an absolute pleasure to work with, giving us more room to experiment and innovate than we’d ever dare ask for. Thanks guys.

Alphagov screenshots emerge

A very positive Telegraph piece about Alphagov includes what, for many people, will be the first sight of a ‘proper’ screenshot:

That screenshot shows several elements which, from what I’ve seen so far, define the Alphagov approach. You’ll note the lack of Home Office/IPS (who? exactly) branding, the absolute prominence of search, the no-nonsense language, and for me the best idea of all, the expectation-setting elements on the right. How often have you sat down to complete an online transaction, only to realise it’s going to take forever, or that you need some crucial document which you don’t have handy? There’s also a tantalising reference to ‘location not set’ – which hints at geo-targeted information?
I’ve seen various Alphagov delivery deadlines mentioned, but now the Telegraph has printed 9 May (straight after purdah), I guess that’s fairly set in stone now.

Cabinet Office's new Red Tape consultation runs on WordPress


The government’s latest crowdsourcing initiative launches today: the Red Tape Challenge takes a slightly more focused approach than previous efforts, naming a specific sector or industry ‘every few weeks’, pointing visitors at Legislation.gov.uk, and asking them what can be scrapped, merged, simplified or improved.
I really like the idea of targeting by sector, but I’m less convinced by the notion of chucking people rather randomly at various Acts of Parliament. It works OK when we’re talking about very specific legislation, such as The Bunk Beds (Entrapment Hazards) (Safety) Regulations 1987. But when it’s something as broad as a Criminal Justice Act, it’s not much help to be dumped at the table of contents, and told to find the clauses which might be relevant to the Topic Of The Week yourself. And even then, it’s the usual chaotic mess of cross-references and amendments.
The site’s been built in WordPress, by the in-house team, and uses a custom theme. There are a few slightly curious things in its configuration, which I can’t immediately work out; and the content (such as it is) is very formulaic, which makes me think it’s been done in a hurry. But it’s very nicely done, and suggests the Cabinet Office team are definitely finding their feet with WordPress.
However, whilst – of course! – I’m going to welcome further use of WordPress at the heart of government, I’m slightly bemused. When they moved their corporate site to Drupal, I assumed they’d be adopting Drupal as their corporate-wide solution… and in all likelihood, everyone else’s too. It would have been perfectly feasible to build this site, and various others they’ve done recently, in Drupal… yet they’re consistently choosing not to. I wonder why?

Permanent Executive Director Digital post advertised

Just posted on the Civil Service jobs website: the recruitment notice for the permanent position of Executive Director Digital, as proposed in the Martha Lane Fox review. It’s the position currently being fulfilled on an interim basis by Chris Chant.
The position is at SCS2 level, worth £142,000 per year, and promises ‘a rewarding role with a great deal of public visibility’. (Well, certainly if Puffbox has anything to do with it, anyway.) They’re clearly pitching it at a serious IT level, with references to ‘a track record of leading digitally enabled change at a strategic level, in a large federated organisation with complex delivery chains.’
The job description calls for someone who will:

  • champion the citizen/end user through the implementation of the Coalition Government’s digital strategy;
  • design the organisation and recruit people to establish a successful Government Digital Service;
  • manage the budget of the central group within the Government Digital Service;
  • direct all government online spending in a way that delivers value for money, makes use of best existing technology, that is both available commercially and also free and results in an improvement of the user experience across all government online services (websites and APIs)
  • reduce the cost of providing the Directgov platform itself in line with efficiency plans; and
  • work closely with the Government Chief Information Officer to direct, set and enforce standards across government departments in areas such as  technical, content, design, process and customer standards.

Plenty to get excited about in there… citizen first, recruitment into the new GDS, APIs, etc… but I’m most particularly drawn to the explicit reference to ‘existing technology available free’. With everything else around it being so serious and high-level, it’s pleasantly surprising to see ‘stuff you can just get off the interweb’ getting a look-in.
The position is open to non-civil servants, and non-UK nationals. Slightly ominously, I note the job advert says ‘Language skills required: none.’ – but let’s hope that’s a quirk of the underlying database. Good language skills are going to be absolutely essential for this.
You’ve got two weeks to get your application in.
(And thanks to various well-placed sources for tipping me off.)
Update, 11:00
I’ve been sent the full job spec, and although it doesn’t add a tremendous amount, there are some interesting titbits therein.

  • ‘The budget for the central group within the Government Digital Service, which is currently £23 million per annum falling in line with other administrative budgets to £17 million in 2014/15.’
  • It talks about website rationalisation ‘through adoption of a single URL for all online services’ – er, really, a single URL? I don’t think that’s quite what they meant. Common parlance seems to have settled on ‘single domain’, but even then, I’m not sure that’s quite how it’ll turn out.
  • The lucky individual will be based at Hercules House, with hot-desking at the Cabinet Office / Treasury offices. As a statement of intent, that’s quite interesting in itself: they clearly want the person concerned to be close to the hands-on work.
  • The recruitment process will happen pretty swiftly, with interviews scheduled for the first half of May, in front of a panel consisting of Ian Watmore, Bill McCluggage and Martha Lane Fox (plus a Civil Service Commissioner).

Reading through it, I’m struck by the differences with the Director of Digital Engagement job spec, published two years ago. Then, the wording seemed to be implying that they were particularly keen on getting someone in from outside, ideally the media – but that didn’t happen. This time, there’s no such implication: if anything, it feels like it’s angling for someone with a Big IT background – quite possibly from within government, or somewhere very like it.
Another quick update, Fri am: Chris Chant has publicly ruled himself out – which is fair enough, as he’s got a pretty big job already.

Directgov meets 95% convergence target

A significant milestone in the evolution of UK e-government was passed last week – very, very quietly. The Cabinet Office had a Departmental Strategic Objective for the 2008-11 spending round, DSO4 if you’re interested, to ‘migrate more than 95% of the total identified websites to Directgov and Businesslink by 31 March 2011’. Well, Directgov’s Tony Singleton announced via Twitter on 1 April:

Remember target to converge 95% of citizen facing content and service to Directgov by end march 11? I’m please to say we did it @directgov

The truth is, I don’t think many people do remember it: the Martha Lane Fox review has since upped the ante quite considerably. But it’s a significant milestone to have reached, all the same.