Archive for June 2011
Open source advocate’s Cabinet Office role
Liam Maxwell is head of ICT at Eton College, and a Conservative councillor in Windsor & Maidenhead. He co-wrote a 2008 paper for the Tories on 'Open Source, Open Standards: Reforming IT procurement in Government', plus the 2010 paper 'Better for Less' for the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, in which he declares: British Government [...] read on »
£874,000 on a website that couldn’t be rescued?
From the Telegraph: Britain’s human rights quango spent £874,000 on a new website that was scrapped and replaced less than two years later after suffering “grave technical difficulties”, it has been revealed. After 18 months of 'repeated crashes and other failures [which] meant it “could not be restored or used further”', the story continues, they [...] read on »
How did I ever cope without BuiltWith?
A site I've found myself using a lot recently, is BuiltWith.com - several times most days in fact. Basically, you give it a URL, and it churns out a nice list of the web technology the site uses. You can go to builtwith.com and enter the URL, like Google; or you can drag their bookmarklet [...] read on »
Transport website relaunched on WordPress (not by us)
There's a new website at the Department of Transport; and it's running on WordPress. Sadly, it's not one we've been involved with; we weren't even approached, in fact. (I wonder why.) However, there are definite similarities with the work we've done for Defra; so we'll console ourselves with the knowledge that we've at least been [...] read on »
On government organograms and RDF files (includes free WordPress plugin!)
There was an initial buzz of excitement yesterday, at the launch of the new data.gov.uk interactive organograms... and then, by teatime, a bit of a backlash. I can see both sides myself. Yes, it's a very cool rendering of potentially quite dull data, and it's nice to see it done in javascript (jQuery) rather than [...] read on »
Rishi Saha leaving government
Rishi Saha, the former digital chief at the Conservative Party who slipped very quietly into the role of Head of Digital Comms at Number10, is on the move again. It's been announced that he's joining PR agency Hill & Knowlton, part of WPP, becoming its new 'Regional Director for Australia, the Middle East, Africa and [...] read on »
Our new site for London mayoral candidate Mike Tuffrey
Today saw the launch of Liberal Democrat member of the London assembly, Mike Tuffrey's campaign to secure the party's nomination for 2012's Mayoral contest. Puffbox has been working with Mike for the last couple of weeks to put together a digital package that's fairly modest for now, but with scope for expansion depending on how [...] read on »