2009 – Page 10

20 Apr 2009

e-government, technology

directgov, rss, wordpress

Don't get a feed, get a blog

I didn’t write about Mash The State when I first heard about it, because the ambitions seemed embarrassingly modest: getting each council in the country to offer an RSS feed by Christmas. In 2009? – seriously?

And then I note that, of the three e-government super-sites – Directgov, Businesslink, NHS Choices, annual budget approx £30m each – only the NHS site offers RSS feeds (and even then, only a few). Directgov has recently started offering its first RSS feed, but if you look at the source code, you’ll note that the URLs all begin with slashes. In other words, they aren’t valid RSS. Or in other less diplomatic words, they’re useless. If a guid isn’t globally unique, then it isn’t a guid. Still, at least they’re trying. Businesslink doesn’t seem to have anything in RSS. At all.

Meanwhile, the rest of the web is racing ahead. I’m especially proud of the DFID Bloggers site in that regard: helpful as ever, WordPress offers pretty much every list available through the site as an RSS feed, if you know the right URL to call. Each category has an RSS feed. Each tag has an RSS feed. Each individual author has an RSS feed. Heck, you can even get search queries as RSS feeds: meaning, in effect, you can have a customised RSS feed of ‘every time that WordPress site mentions X’. All out of the box; at zero charge and zero effort. They just happen.

RSS continues to delight me as a website designer and builder. Recent WordPress releases have added some extra – undocumented? – tricks: for example, if you can construct the right URL query string, you can get an RSS feeds of all items except those from a certain category. (Clue: ‘cat=-1’.) And it’s going to get even better imminently, with the inclusion of the brilliant SimplePie, for consuming RSS, into the next WordPress release.

I’ve built entire sites like Real Help Now and onepolitics powered solely by RSS feeds from third-party sites. I’m even building a couple of WordPress sites now which will use their own internal RSS feeds to surface content, rather than me coding ‘proper’ PHP/SQL queries. It’s just easier. And when you’re doing something as an outsider because it’s easier than the ‘proper’ internal method, you know we’ve reached somewhere significant.

The truth is, if your website still isn’t offering an RSS feed, you’re falling further and further behind the rest of the web, and you’re depriving yourself of the magic which eager geeks might bring to your content. But before you go spending money adding an RSS feed to, say, your press release pages – don’t. There’s a content management solution which is optimised for delivering text documents on a rolling basis, presented chronologically. You’re looking at it.
20 Apr 2009

e-government

blogs, foreignoffice, zimbabwe

Time called on top UK blogger

In February, The Times named the blog written by Philip Barclay and Grace Mutandwa, staff at the British Embasy in Zimbabwe, to be one of the UK’s best. And rightly so. Some of the stuff they’ve written has been the most moving I’ve ever read on a blog. But while Grace is a local, Philip is part of the diplomatic staff – and in keeping with FCO policy, once three years are up, he’ll be moved on.

‘The Foreign Office is cruel,’ he writes in his final post. ‘My brain must go on to some other job, while my heart stays in Zimbabwe. How cruel to be dragged away just as recovery might begin.’ As ever, it’s stirring stuff: how the experience has changed him from an ‘arrogant and complacent British diplomat’, snapshots of the anguish and beauty in the country, expressions of optimism tinged with unspoken anger.

The blog will continue, he writes, in the hands of his colleague, ‘the incomparable Grace’. But that, in itself, takes us into intriguing territory: a Zimbabwean writing such a high-profile blog on behalf of the British diplomatic service. It’s terrible to have to write this, but I hope it goes OK for her. I was delighted to meet Philip at the FCO’s blogging seminar a few weeks back; it’ll be interesting to see if, or how he might take the blogging thing forward into his new role.
13 Apr 2009

company, technology

cardiff, wordcampuk, wordpress

Matt Mullenweg to attend UK WordCamp

Tickets have just gone on sale for this year’s second WordCamp UK. And if the promise of hearing me banging on about WordPress isn’t quite enough to tempt you to spend a July weekend in Cardiff, here’s some news that might swing it: Matt Mullenweg, basically ‘Mr WordPress’, is coming too.

I’m also proud to confirm that, although we haven’t finalised the details yet, Puffbox will again be sponsoring the event… and for the very same reasons as I described last year. Many good contacts were made in Birmingham: in my own case, some of this year’s more exciting and ambitious projects simply wouldn’t have happened, had I not met certain people last July. I’m better at what I do, as a direct result, and the company proposition is lot stronger too. It’s a chance to say thank you… and to make sure that the event definitely happens, for my own potential benefit… and others’ too.

I’ll almost certainly be leading a session on the progress of WordPress in central government: I’ve got one or two interesting projects to talk about, and I’m sure I’ll touch on these, but it’s probably more interesting for more people if I give a cross-government overview. And I think I might have volunteered to take the opening ‘icebreaker’ session.

Tickets for the event are £25 until the end of May – and with Matt Mullenweg confirmed as attending, it might be wise to snap yours up swiftly. For those who want to give a little something back to the community, there’s also a ‘microsponsor’ option where you can choose to pay nearly three times face value, to attend exactly the same event. (It’s proving quite a popular option, for the record.)
12 Apr 2009

e-government, politics

civilservice, damianmcbride, downingstreet, foi, guidofawkes

McBride: a scandal for the internet age
So Damian McBride appears to have been taken down by the blogger he was considering trying to emulate.

It’s being reported that McBride’s emails were sent from his official Downing Street email account. If so, that’s a naive error to have made: partly because it leaves him open to (valid) accusations of misusing public resources, and partly because it exposes him to the risk of exposure via FOI. Guido republished an email he had sent to McBride requesting ‘copies of all emails referring to either myself or my publication, “the Guido Fawkes Blog”… under the provisions of the Data Protection Act (1998).’ (Mind you, Derek Draper told Sky News tonight that his private email had been ‘hacked into’.)

It would have been an ugly and unpleasant story if he’d been a Labour Party employee discussing such tactics; or even if McBride had sent the emails in his own time, from his own email account. But it wouldn’t have been quite so explosive. And let’s face it, it probably wouldn’t have come to light. (Frankly, I assume such conversations happen all the time inside most political parties.)

So let’s clear up the technicalities. Someone created a new blog at wordpress.com, under the ID ‘aredrag’ at 4:24pm GMT on Tuesday 4 November – a free service with a minimally intrusive registration form. On the same day, before or after, someone using the pseudonym Ollie Cromwell registered the domain name ‘theredrag.co.uk’ – a tenner for two years through easily.co.uk. They then paid wordpress.com the $15/year fee to run a wordpress.com-hosted site under a different domain name. The site itself consists of a standard Kubrick template, with only the default ‘Hello world!’ post visible. It has a (very rough) custom header graphic, but beyond that, it’s as ‘out of the box’ as it could be. To me, it suggests someone who knows what they’re doing online; and in the right hands, it could have taken only a few minutes. It doesn’t necessarily imply a coordinated, organised, resourced smear campaign.

At its heart, this is a story about the thin line between politics and government – a subject often mused upon in these pages. Now of course, it’s not a new riddle. But it’s the fact that any individual, with no great financing or technical skill, can become a journalist and publisher in minutes that adds a new dimension. It allows McBride and/or Draper to contemplate setting up such a scurrilous website in the first place. And equally, it has brought mavericks like Guido Fawkes into the mix: independent, and with nothing to lose.

Numerous times, we’ve tried to draw lines separating party politics and public duties – MPs’ communications allowances, civil servants in quite obviously politically-focussed positions, Ministers blogging their political views, whatever. In this culture of constant communication, I’m wondering if that’s still possible.
- Does the Prime Minister have to be the ‘leader’ of his/her party? On reflection, Blair and Prescott did a fairly good double-act, with one being the head of government, the other being the party chief.
- And does the PM’s spokesman actually have to be a civil servant? Should we accept that Downing Street is a special case, exempt from the same neutrality requirement of front-line, service-delivery Whitehall departments? We can’t play out our West Wing fantasies with politically neutral civil servants.
There’s a long way to go on this one. A very long way.
9 Apr 2009

e-government

mikelittle, wordpress

WordPress co-founder's e-government work
So many new websites appearing at the moment, you’d think it was the end of the financial year or something. The new DIUS site is very pretty, although I hear it wasn’t cheap. There’s a new site for the Ministry of Justice, which (if I’m totally honest) feels a bit dated, and clearly has several rough edges still to be smoothed. The new Parliament site looks really fresh and welcoming, putting its WordPress-powered news function front and centre… although when it comes to Hansard, probably its primary raison d’etre, it still can’t come close to TheyWorkForYou. I’m not particularly fond of the new Civil Service site overall, but it’s good to see them trying some new things.

But one launch you may well have missed amongst all these big splashes is the Law Commission’s consultation site. It doesn’t look much, but it’s notable because:
- it’s been done on WordPress, slotted seamlessly into a site which more typically relies on PDF files (!).
- it also includes a discussion forum running on WordPress’s sister project, bbPress; not as common as you might think. And
- it’s the work of Mike Little – the WordPress founder who isn’t Matt Mullenweg.
Having met him at last year’s WordCamp, I introduced Mike to a few government people last year, and I know he’s been doing a few WordPress jobs with Whitehall clients – but this is the first one (I think?) where he’s gone on record to take his credit. So I can finally say how fantastic it is to have him on the team, as it were, further adding to the credibility of WordPress in the government space… and I’m hoping we can find a few opportunities to work together.
8 Apr 2009

company, politics

Puffbox's new site for digital politics 'guru'

A while back, I did a very quick job for the Liberal Democrats, working with their (now outgoing) Head of Innovations, Mark Pack. So I considered it a real honour when Mark then asked me to help him put together his own personal site: and markpack.org.uk went live this week.

It wasn’t a straightforward ‘web design’ project: frankly, that would have made things quite a bit easier. Instead, it was primarily about aggregating Mark’s contributions to other websites. Most of his writing appears at Liberal Democrat Voice, the independent site for party activists; he also writes regularly for Wardman Wire, Iain Dale’s Total Politics, and the long-established liberal magazine Liberator. This has given him a very high profile, not just among the LibDem community, but in the wider field of online political activity. But unlike most other people with similar name recognition, there wasn’t any one place where you could find out who he was – which might explain the rather curious characterisation of him by some as an ‘attack dog‘!

For the most part then, it’s a WordPress site being fed by other WordPress sites. We’re taking the ‘author feeds’ from LDV and Wardman, importing them automatically using the FeedWordPress plugin, and categorising them appropriately as they come in. Other stuff will be added manually: some items written for print, some written solely for the site. And that’s not to mention the Twitter feed, or Mark’s read items from the LibDig site, or his cuddly pink alter ego, or…

That’s a lot of disparate material to pull together, but I’m really pleased with the results – particularly the presentation of the individual items. Even though very little has been written with this site in mind, the site hangs together pretty well as an entity in itself, and the templates have (so far?!) been able to handle everything thrown into them.

It’s been tricky to build a site which doesn’t ‘own’ most of its own content… but it’s been great fun to work with someone who knows the business so well. We’ve been able to bounce ideas off each other throughout the development process, often challenging me in ways most clients aren’t able to do. And I’m very comfortable leaving Mark with the ability to customise the site going forward with plugins, widgets and so on. As a quick skim of his writing will reveal, he knows what he’s doing.
7 Apr 2009

company, e-government

careandsupport, ournhs, wordpress, yui

Our new site for Social Care green paper

Puffbox’s latest project in the health sector is Care Support Independence, a WordPress-based website in support of the forthcoming green paper on funding and delivering social care. Sadly though, I can’t present it as another victory for WordPress, as it’s a rebuild of a site that already ran on WP.

The original CareAndSupport website was launched last summer; but truth be told, it had fallen off the rails a bit since. I was asked to rework the site, following the very successful model of the Our NHS Our Future site built for Lord Darzi’s NHS review – and, perhaps crucially, giving hands-on control to the team’s experienced in-house writer.

At least to begin with, we’ve consciously kept the design very close to what went before: bold blocks of colour, rounded corners, fairly plain text on a white background. This should make people feel more comfortable in the transition from old site to new; and it has allowed us to concentrate on the mechanics of the move. The new WordPress theme – built from scratch, as usual – is a wonder of minimalism, with all pages (bar the homepage) being rendered using the same index.php template: it should make it much easier to step up a gear when the green paper is published.

It’s the first time I’ve built pages using Yahoo’s YUI Grids CSS – and it certainly won’t be the last. It made laying out the page as easy, and as reliable cross-browser, as old-skool table markup. Have a play with this excellent ajax-powered grid builder to see how it all works; if you like it, I highly recommend this one-page cheat sheet. It’s a pretty good story in terms of HTML validation, too: the only error picked up by the W3C validator is the use of aria-required in the default WordPress comment template.

Having moved the site successfully, we can start thinking more ambitiously about future functionality, design and content. There’s a clue as to the direction of our thinking in the link to the team’s Facebook group.
7 Apr 2009

Uncategorised

Operational note: sorry

On reflection, it did seem a bit quiet. I discovered yesterday that I haven’t been receiving emails from the website for about three weeks. So if anyone’s been trying to email me through the contact form, or wondering why I wasn’t approving their comments – I promise, I wasn’t ignoring you.

In fact, a bit of radio silence was probably a good thing on balance: it’s been a very busy few weeks here at Puffbox HQ. Two sites went live in the last 24 hours, I’m handing over another one tomorrow, and another (huge one) next week. Something to do with the end of the financial year, do you think? As ever, I’ll write up the details here… but with so many to do at once, it may take some time.
2 Apr 2009

e-government, technology

google, maps

Wiped off the map

I’ve come across a rather curious anomaly in Google’s new Street View. Southampton is one of the cities covered in the initial UK rollout… or rather, most of Southampton. You’ll note the bizarrely unavailable stretch of Romsey Road… and the odd interruption of Wimpson Lane. Here’s a link to it in Street View, to see for yourself.

So… who do you think operates from this unmapped building? If you need a clue, read this piece I wrote late last year: ‘Ordnance Survey ban Google Maps‘.

Of course, I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason.
31 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

analytics, coi, coigovuk, digigov, opensource, piwik

The open source answer to website auditing
I wrote the other week about ‘the implications of free‘: how the widespread availability of high-quality technology changed the rules when it comes to project management. Another example struck me today, around COI’s ongoing consultation on improving government websites.

There’s a lengthy section on measuring website usage, with detailed proposals around the new requirement for website auditing, kicking in imminently with the aim of ensuring that ‘the rules for measuring the number of Unique User/Browsers, Page Impressions, Visits and Visit Duration have been implemented correctly’. Government websites’ data will be audited twice a year, at a minimum cost of £1,740 per audit.

So what’s the alternative in the post-free world? How about a centrally managed, mandatory, open-source web analytics package – like Piwik?
- It would place the absolute minimum demand on individual departments: all they’d have to do is include a few lines of javascript at the bottom of their page templates – just like Google Analytics.
- It wouldn’t stop departments running their own analytics packages, if they so desired. Not that many would want or need to.
- Implementation of appropriate standards – statistical, technical, privacy, transparency, etc – could be guaranteed by experts at the centre.
- Lower overall cost: in terms of purchase, ongoing licensing & support, and of course, auditing.
- Freedom to tailor it to particular government requirements, if any.
I must say at this point, I’ve got no direct experience of Piwik myself: but the demo looks great, and it’s used by people I respect – such as Sourceforge and MySociety (eg TheyWorkForYou). Plus, as TWFY demonstrates, you can use Piwik alongside other tracking methods: they seem to have two others on the page too. It’s still at version 0.something, but they’re pledging to hit v1.0 ‘in 2009‘. (Actually, can any of the MySociety gang share their experiences?)

Instead, where will the COI guidance leave us? Website owners will face a financial penalty (admittedly a relatively modest one) if they aren’t using a 2-star rated ABCe Associate Subscriber. And how many of these ‘recommended’ analytics tools are open source, do you think?

Perhaps COI might want to take another look at the Open Source Strategy, (re)published just a month ago: for example, the part where Tom Watson says in his foreword:

We need to increase the pace. We want to ensure that we continue to use the best possible solutions for public services at the best value for money; and that we pay a fair price for what we have to buy. We want to share and re-use what the taxpayer has already purchased across the public sector – not just to avoid paying twice, but to reduce risks and to drive common, joined up solutions to the common needs of government. We want to encourage innovation and innovators – inside Government by encouraging open source thinking, and outside Government by helping to develop a vibrant market. We want to give leadership to the IT industry and to the wider economy to benefit from the information we generate and the software we develop in Government.

I’d be grateful if COI would consider this as Puffbox Ltd’s contribution to the consultation exercise. Thank you.