Comments for Puffbox.com

Comment on Open standards consultation now, er, open by Jenny Poole

Jenny Poole — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:44:19 +0000

Thanks for the feedback guys, we're working on addressing some of these issues today. I still haven't got to the bottom of what to do when there are 80, 90 questions on consultations. I think some kind of interactive survey integrated with wordpress would be amazing, especially if it allowed you to look at the source chapter while you were answering.

Comment on Open standards consultation now, er, open by Gillian

Gillian — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:01:55 +0000

I came to this post in response to your tweet about testing 'only Simon can reply' and got sidetracked into looking at the Government OS consultation paper. 'Us and them' appears to go a lot further than you suggest: there's no mention in the introductions of how Government OS will affect citizens.

Comment on Open standards consultation now, er, open by Simon

Simon — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:45:40 +0000

Fair point; but deep down, this is a pretty academic subject. It's tied up in legalities, EU directives and arcane discussion about the tiniest technical differences. I don't know quite how readable it can be made to be. Plus, of course, bear in mind where Liam Maxwell comes from. A certain academic leaning is surely to be expected?

Comment on Open standards consultation now, er, open by Simon

Simon — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:44:04 +0000

You're getting dangerously close to full-on form plugins with that, though. Automattic's own Grunion contact form is excellent if people just want form-to-email; for public display, you're almost certainly looking at Gravity Forms, possibly with the Custom Post Type add-on. That said, I still think there's a place for online survey tools: although I tend to recommend Wufoo or PollDaddy to people, over SurveyMonkey. I haven't yet found a WP-native solution which makes form creation easy, and gives really good reporting on results.

Comment on Open standards consultation now, er, open by Adam

Adam — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:37:31 +0000

Just looking at those pages puts makes me glaze over so I tried putting the introduction (http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/chapter-1/) through a readability test. I used this one http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php

It seemed to get rated on about level with an academic paper.

Perhaps using simpler writing style and guidelines would make people more likely to read/use them and participate.

Comment on Open standards consultation now, er, open by Steph Gray

Steph Gray — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:39:00 +0000

It's a funny structure - not quite commentable but sort of... I'm not even quite clear whether a 'comment' left on the site is public or private?

Maybe Commentariat 3 needs to be a plugin of some kind that adds post- or page-level options to extend the comment form with arbitrary custom response fields and let respondents choose whether to post publicly or privately. Would that basically cover what people seem to want in 2012, without resorting to SurveyMonkey?

Comment on GDS needs more devs, offers more money by Simon

Simon — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:11:10 +0000

Thanks for that clarification Tony; much appreciated.

Comment on Saul’s gov.uk plugin now on Github; anyone know Ruby? by Stephen Cronin

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:33 +0000

Sorry, can't help with that - but I wish someone would make PHP versions of most of their code. I'd love to get my hands on a PHP version of the need-a-tron.

Comment on GDS needs more devs, offers more money by Chris Thorpe

Chris Thorpe — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:35:50 +0000

The two year fixed contracts are great for younger candidates. Perhaps designed to discourage old lags with useful(?) experience?

Comment on GDS needs more devs, offers more money by Tim Hargis

Tim Hargis — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:58:12 +0000

I know it will be a long term project but it looks like it could be really fulfilling for the developers involved.