Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    '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 the companies recognising as the best in the world. And courtesy of their RSS feeds, we’ll be able to display the latest additions on the site, more or less seamlessly. The main site will be updated automatically, as soon as you upload your image or clip, give or take a slight delay for feed cacheing. And the media items will be available to members of those sites’ communities worldwide, making it easier to find and (theoretically) share.

    My mind inevitably drifted back to the Bad Old Days, and the weeks I spent discussing, writing and reviewing Functional Specifications. I can imagine how long it would have taken, a couple of years back, to get anything like the functionality which Flickr and YouTube offer me, free of charge, in a matter of moments. And for all the risks of using a third-party service, with no formal SLA per se, I’ve yet to see things go any more wrong than any equivalent function you might have commissioned from one of the Big Ugly Consultancies. (If at all.)

    Case in point: It took a couple of hours last week – from a standing start – to decide to use Flickr for photos from the regional launches of NHS future visions, as chronicled by the Our NHS Our Future website, and work out how we might do it. The images are now featuring (automatically, courtesy of Flickr’s tag feeds) in the popups on the homepage map. It makes the whole thing much more personal and human… which is entirely in keeping with the exercise itself. And it’s basically Flickr plus an RSS parser doing all the work.

    Fact is, it’s now outrageously easy to integrate best-of-breed video and photo functionality in any website. The technology is straightforward, and the (lack of a) pricetag means the bulk of the bureaucracy can be avoided. It used to be a case of ‘how would we do it?’. Now it’s more like ‘why aren’t we doing it?’.

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    Blears backs wider use of online petitions

    Writing on Comment Is Free, Hazel Blears reckons Labour’s problem is that it has become distanced from its voters. ‘The problem is the powerlessness within the system for the majority of people,’ she writes. ‘People feel that their views disappear into a black hole, without the slightest echo.’

    Hazel’s solution is ‘a healthy dose of direct democracy’: more directly elected mayors, a reinvigorated co-op movement, and online petitions. ‘Petitions, especially on-line, should be used to guide the deliberations of local councillors and ministers,’ she says. ‘Petitioners should be able to press for debates in council chambers and even parliament.’

    If that inspires anyone to set up their own petitions system… don’t forget that the Downing Street petitions system, built by MySociety, is ‘open source’, meaning you can download and use it free of charge.

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    'Our NHS' reskinned

    One of my favourite projects over the last year has been Our NHS, Our Future – the website for Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS. With the review entering its final stages, we’ve taken the opportunity to give the site a lick of paint, and reworked the homepage.

    Reflecting the local focus of the review, the centrepiece of the new homepage is a great big clickable map showing England broken up into its Strategic Health Authorities. Each SHA is publishing a ‘vision document’ over the next month or so: clicking the map will generate a popup with a news story about the document, or a ‘coming soon’ message. It’s all being done with PHP and Javascript, so the site manager only has to write and publish his story: everything else is automated from there. We’re also hoping to get photos from each launch event, which will get added into the map’s popups via Flickr’s tag feeds. (Not a huge enhancement: we’ve been consuming YouTube RSS feeds since last year.)

    This is the third iteration of the website in nine months: we launched initially in late August using Typepad, but moved to WordPress in November as Typepad showed its limitations. It perfectly demonstrates the value in adopting a blogging platform as your CMS: sure, the (base) content type is primitive… but it means the job of tweaking, redesigning or even migrating becomes so much easier.

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    MPs condemn lack of usage data

    The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published its latest report on ‘Government on the Internet: Progress in delivering information and services online‘ a few weeks back. Much of it was pretty predictable: we know we don’t have an exact figure for the number of websites, we know we aren’t always brilliant on accessibility, and we’ve heard the social exclusion argument countless times (although we haven’t heard much from the Cabinet Minister responsible).

    (Correction: I see Paul Murphy gave his first speech as Minister for Digital Inclusion a week or two back. Details on the Puffbox-produced Wales Office website… and hey, also available in Welsh.)

    But its conclusions include some genuinely worrying data. ‘16% of government organisations have no data about how their websites are being used,’ it tells us – what, none at all? I’ve come across a few in my time, but never feared it was quite that many. Unforgivable in these post-Google Analytics days, surely. A quarter could provide no data on costs. Only 19% provided a full picture on cost and usage.

    I’m not sure I can accept the assertion, based on NAO data, that ‘overall the quality (of government websites) has improved only slightly since 2001 and one in six sites has become significantly worse’. But it leads to an interesting aside, which seems to call for government departments to embrace user-generated content..?

    The National Audit Office found that many government websites have yet to adopt approaches now commonplace among leading private sector websites. These include allowing users to post content onto websites and to provide comments about the services and information provided. … Some government sites are piloting such facilities, and some are well established including the online petitions facility on the 10 Downing Street website and the Department of Health’s feedback and testimonials site for NHS patients.

    But perhaps the most striking recommendation of all is the proposal that ‘no new (websites) should be established without the agreement of the Government’s Chief Information Officer in the Cabinet Office’. That might be enforceable on a domain name level… but it surely can’t be workable in terms of subdomains or microsites. (And that’s before we think about areas on external community sites, whose usage was endorsed by the Power Of Information work.)

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    Irrational(ised) Business Link

    I’ve just received an invite to attend a Free Business Advice Open Day, hosted by HMRC with the support and active participation of Business Link. Their glossy leaflet includes a URL on the front cover: www.businessadviceday.gov.uk. You can probably guess where I’m going with this.

    In November 2005, the Transformational Government strategy declared:

    For customer information, self-service transactions and campaign support, services will converge on Directgov and Business Link as the primary on-line entry points; service-specific or stand-alone solutions will be phased out.

    Er, so what is this site exactly? A stand-alone site with self-service transaction. And to make matters worse, there’s no reference anywhere in the leaflet to the main Business Link URL. (Interestingly, several of the other partner organisations include their URLs in their logos, making them actually better represented than Business Link!)

    A whois search reveals that the businessadviceday domain was actually registered more than a year after the Transformational strategy was published. There’s really little hope for rationalisation when customer-facing activity like this, on behalf of one of the primary beneficiaries of rationalisation, is being handled through stand-alone websites.

    PS: Today was actually the first time I’ve come across a whois which works for gov.uk – hosted by Janet. Well worth bookmarking, although its accuracy is limited. Most of the records for well-established domain names are listed as being ‘created’ in 2003, which clearly isn’t right. But basic contact details are generally included, and should provide a starting point at least.

  • Puffbox.com technical problems

    Apologies to anyone trying to access this website over the course of Thursday. Due to a slight misunderstanding with my ISP, the site was taken (briefly) offline. Thankfully, it’s all steadily resolving itself. But if you were trying to get a comment through to the website, or trying to email me since Wednesday evening, please try again.

    As it happens, it was a pretty simple hiccup. The automated email, sent ‘by’ my UK-based ISP, said I had to renew my domain by 05/06/2008. Each time a date was quoted, it was quoted in that same format. Not unreasonably, given that I’m dealing with a UK ISP, I took that to mean 5 June. It actually meant 6 May.

    It serves as a warning to anyone planning to deal trans-Atlantically… including, as in this case, companies outsourcing parts of their customer-facing activity. I bet I’m not the first to fall foul of this.

  • UK media endorses 'presidential' politics

    There’s a very interesting revelation in Sky election expert Michael Thrasher’s analysis of last week’s election results. He notes the fact that Sky’s calculation of gains and losses was very different to the BBC’s: a question of how they both chose to handle boundary and allegiance changes. (An ugly consequence of the UK’s ever-changing geography, but that’s for another time.)

    What intrigued me most was his revelation that the national media organisations have all agreed a common method for handling these calculations at the next general election, where similar boundary changes will also apply.

    The national broadcast organisations, BBC, ITN and Sky, together with the Press Association, have agreed a set of estimated results for the 2005 election in newly created constituencies that sit alongside the real ones for constituencies whose boundaries are unchanged. The calculation of each party’s gains and losses are based on these agreed figures. Furthermore, the figures will take no account of any by-election changes or changes of party allegiance by individual MPs in the meantime.

    In my mind, that effectively endorses ‘presidential politics’. You aren’t voting for an MP, you’re voting for a PM. It doesn’t matter if that MP changes allegiance; and by-elections can’t be taken seriously. The only count that counts is a general election.

    Sadly, as often happens in statistics, there’s no right and wrong answer. You could very justifiably argue that it’s always better to compare like with like. You could equally argue that we already have presidential politics by default anyway. And that turnout at general elections is generally higher than by-elections, making them a more valid measure. All of which would make this decision the right one. So I’m not arguing with that.

    It just seems a bit odd to see a formal institutional recognition that ultimately your choice of MP, whoever he/she is, and whatever happens to him/her do post-general election, is meaningless. So perhaps the only way forward for UK democracy is to recognise the presidential aspect, and separate the executive from the legislative. Yeah, like that’ll happen.

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    More Gov live blogging

    There’s no doubt what the hot trend in blogging is: real time, thanks largely (or perhaps solely?) to the superb CoverItLive application/service. And following the apparent success of the Progressive Governance Summit last month, we’ll be seeing another e-government example today.

    More than 80 MDs, CEOs, chairmen and Presidents from big-name global companies, plus a few heads of government (including our own) and various other dignitaries are attending ‘Business Call To Action’ – a London conference, backed by the UK government and UN Development Programme, to talk about what business can do to reduce poverty in the developing world, and get the Millennium Development Goals back on track. It’s quite an illustrious guest list, even if it’s only published in PDF.

    The web component isn’t Downing Street-branded, but it’s being managed by the Downing Street team, with some Puffbox assistance (although most of the work has been handled by someone else). The plan is to run another liveblog of the proceedings, again using CoverItLive… plus a bit of video, and Flickr/Twitter mashing if schedules allow.

    On my last post on the subject, Paul Canning queried the value of liveblogging, in the context of election coverage… and I take his point, in that context. But for something like this, it can provide an excellent channel for colour commentary, or even ‘context sensitive links’: when we did the ProGov event, people were contributing URLs providing additional background on the points being raised, for people who didn’t know the subjects. (Like, for example, me.)

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    Long Term Support for WordPress

    Oops. I wrote this piece yesterday, wishing that WordPress offered Long Term Support for occasional releases, along the lines of Ubuntu. I then get a comment from Mr WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg, telling me that there actually is a long-term supported release. Here it is for the record…

    The official policy from Team WordPress about software upgrades, as described by Matt Mullenweg last month, is pretty straightforward: when we release a new version, you should upgrade. Like, immediately. But when you’re dealing with the corporate world, where you deliver a project and effectively walk away, it isn’t quite so simple… and I’d personally welcome a Long Term Support approach along the lines of Ubuntu.

    WordPress was built for bloggers: technically literate self-publishers, with some grasp at least of what’s involved in running a website. But as I’ve documented here countless times, and as my continuing mortgage payments demonstrate, comms professionals with no particular IT skills find its convenience, flexibility and simplicity (not to mention the price) equally appealing.

    But the chink in the armour, if you like, is WordPress updates. Corporate projects tend to come with lists of requirements, which push well beyond normal blog-based sites. Normally, these requirements are achievable using plugins or a bit of custom code. But as Matt acknowledges, when an upgrade comes, there’s no guarantee that a particular plugin will work. And even worse, given that most plugins are offered up by volunteers, there’s no guarantee that the plugin will be updated accordingly.

    I’m afraid Matt’s assertion that ‘having a secure site is much more important than the functionality of a single plugin’ won’t really stand up in the corporate context. You’ll ultimately face a decision between a site which might be at risk, but does everything you want; or (to put it provocatively) an under-performing site which still won’t be 100% secure anyway, because nothing ever is. And I’m afraid most marketing or communications people will choose the former.

    There’s also the issue of the high-visibility upgrade notifications in the more recent WordPress releases. Whilst these are fantastic for those of us who run our own server setups, and aren’t scared of the upgrade process, I’ve had several phone calls from clients who are seeing this warning, and panicking (I’d say) unnecessarily. And I can’t honestly promise them that ‘hey, just do it, nothing can possibly go wrong.’

    There is a compromise solution here: and that’s the model of Ubuntu‘s Long Term Support releases.

    There’s a new version of Ubuntu’s Linux package every six months, with a promise to offer product support (ie minor fixes) for at least 18 months. But some of these are designated as having Long Term Support: these come with a promise of three years’ worth of fixes for the desktop version, and five years’ worth for server versions. It doesn’t mean that you’ll never have to do a major upgrade. But it’s a guarantee that the fundamentals won’t change for a considerable period – long enough to put the IT manager’s mind at rest.

    That’s the kind of commitment I’d value as a WordPress ‘developer’. I want to present pitches to clients based on guarantees, not probability. And I’ve seen specific examples of excellent WordPress plugins, perfectly secure and stable in their own rights, which suddenly become obsolete because something changes in the next major WordPress release. Looking back, the changes are almost certainly for the better overall; but not if I’ve built a particular function around a particular plugin which no longer works.

    The v2.5 release of WordPress takes it to a new level of maturity. A policy of LTS releases, ideally via simple ‘overwrite this file with that file’ patching, would signal the product’s readiness to be taken most seriously in corporate environments. And it would make an already strong proposition almost undeniable.

    … and here’s the info about the ‘legacy 2.0 branch’ which is almost exactly what I was asking for. Now, I consider myself fairly well versed in the ways of WordPress, but I’d never even heard of this, and various Google searches yielded nothing.

    I guess my only response would be that the description of the legacy branch needs to be rethought. The word ‘legacy’ (to me anyway) sounds negative; the idea of ‘Long Term Support’ sounds positive.

    My thanks to Matt for correcting me, without making me sound like a total idiot.

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    Liveblogging the election results

    Interesting to note some of the attempts to ‘live blog’ the election results last week – with Guido Fawkes, Slugger O’Toole and ConservativeHome all using CoverItLive‘s fantastic liveblogging ‘app’. Needless to say, there’s significant variation in the tone of each site’s usage.

    Of course, it’s ironic to note both having a pop at Gordon Brown’s leadership when, dare I mention it, it was a Downing Street website – produced by yours truly – which first brought this technology to the attention of the UK political scene.

    Now Iain Dale’s gone a bit CoverItLive-crazy, using it as an ad-hoc chatroom facility. It’s not really what it was intended for, and it’s probably quite hard work for Iain and colleague Shane Greer to moderate, but it does the job I suppose. They’re making good use of the popup polling mechanism, it must be said.

    Correction: It took a heck of a lot of digging to find it, but I discover that ConservativeHome did use the CoverItLive tool back in January. My apologies; a straightforward Google search didn’t reveal it. I’m grateful to Guido for the advice to the contrary.