Archive for November 2011
WordPress comes ‘home’: France holds its first WordCamp
It seemed like fun. A quick jaunt over to Paris, to attend their first WordCamp proper. A chance to put my French to its toughest test in 17 years. A chance to attend a WordCamp as an ordinary punter, rather than as an organiser. And a good opportunity to check up on the neighbours. Paris [...] read on »
Small site, big name
It feels like ages since I built a site completely from scratch; so much recently has been about invisible enhancement, or extra-large scale work taking months to reach its conclusion. So it's been great fun to do a small and relatively quick build for the Commission on Devolution in Wales, established to review the present [...] read on »
Harley to retire; new CIO & Deputy to be hired
The recent silence from government CIO Joe Harley had been noted; now comes confirmation from his original employer, DWP that he is to retire at the end of the year. The DWP press release states: The process for selecting his successor, as CIO for DWP, will begin immediately. The Cabinet Office will run a separate [...] read on »
More GDS vacancies
I see there are another couple of Government Digital Service job vacancies up for grabs: this time, they're looking for two User Experience Researchers, with a quoted salary range of '£44,300 to £56,000 with potential to rise to £59,000 through performance related pay.' The lucky winners will be 'responsible for planning, designing and conducting all [...] read on »
Chant’s warning to multinationals and client-side IT
Video from ukauthority.com Chris Chant has given an interview to ukauthority.com, expanding on the shift to a product-centric, off-the-shelf model for government IT. SMEs, he says, are 'absolutely front and centre to what we need... and it's that market we're really encouraging.' It will be a bit challenging, he concedes - probably more than SMEs [...] read on »
Paris go! Off to France’s first WordCamp
France's first 'proper' WordCamp takes place in Paris in a couple of weeks: and I've just bought my ticket. I did French as part of my degree - although that was nearly two decades ago, and only a tiny part of it was ever computer-related. So I'm placing a lot of confidence in 1) my [...] read on »
BBC ‘news jockey’ experiment
By Steve Herrmann, writing on the BBC News Editors blog yesterday: During the past few years the "live page" format has become a regular feature of our coverage around big breaking stories. The format has been a big success in terms of usage, so we're thinking about what more we could do with it. We [...] read on »
Foreign Office finally switches to WordPress
Earlier this week, the Foreign Office rebuilt its blogs.fco.gov.uk site. It doesn't look much different. But the screenshot above isn't the significant one. The one below is. Yes, after some gentle encouragement on the pages of this blog, it's great to see the Foreign Office moving off the Apache Roller blogging platform - What, you've [...] read on »
When WordPress gets boring, things get interesting
[Thanks to @JonAkwue for suggesting a vastly improved headline for this piece...] The big moment of this year's Word Up Whitehall came in the second presentation of the day: Gavin Dispain from the Department for Transport, telling the story of their hasty migration to WordPress. It was already clear that we were in very different [...] read on »