puffbox

‘It’s getting easier, isn’t it?’

There was a sudden chill in the air when I uttered those words in a client meeting this week. We’re planning another high-profile WordPress-based website, with ‘mashing’ of RSS feeds from third-party sites like YouTube and Flickr a prominent ingredient. In practice, that means the site’s photo galleries and video streaming have been ‘contracted out’ to [...] read on »

Full-text feeds on BBC blogs

It’s great to see the long-awaited improvement to the BBC’s blog infrastructure coming fully on-stream. I’m hearing reports of long, long hours being worked this week; and the inevitable post-launch debugging work continues. The Beeb’s Jem Stone describes the full horror, and scores extra points for an obscure Guns N Roses reference. But I’ve spotted one [...] read on »

New Foreign Office website

A year after spending £1.47m on the Morello content management system, the new Foreign Office website went live this morning. Having spent five great years there, the FCO is naturally dear to my heart; but with David Miliband at the helm, its online activity takes on added significance. So how’s the new site looking? It’s unquestionably [...] read on »

No10 now on Twitter

There isn’t much to see there yet, but 10 Downing Street has just opened an official Twitter account. Like a lot of corporate presences, it’s based - in these initial stages at least - on their existing RSS output, and the free Twitterfeed web service. But I had a very interesting chat this afternoon with [...] read on »

onepolitics, the new Puffbox site

It wasn’t originally intended for public consumption, but today I’m unveiling a new website produced by Puffbox. onepolitics is an at-a-glance view of the latest posts on the growing number of political blogs being written by ‘proper’ reporters. You can wait until tomorrow to see what they say in print, or in tonight’s bulletin; or [...] read on »

WordPress as a CRM tool?

Another example of why I love WordPress. Somebody has built a new theme which, with the help of a few common plugins, becomes a contact manager - with search, tagging, ‘related people’, etc. But I think it can be pushed further. Using the standard WordPress comment functionality, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t turn [...] read on »