2009 – Page 6 – Puffbox

6 Aug 2009

company, e-government

consultation, dfid, wordpress, wordpressmu

Building DFID's new consultation platform
A few months back, I helped the Department For International Development set up an online consultation site for their white paper on Eliminating World Poverty. We used WordPress (obviously), plus Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme (with a few tweaks). The site was well received, and had close to 500 reader comments, many of them lengthy. So when a new consultation came along, into DFID’s plans to spend £8.5bn on education in developing countries, I’m delighted to say they were keen to do it again.

This time, we’ve done it slightly differently – creating a reusable platform for online consultations, instead of just another one-off site build. Rather than use the Commentariat theme itself, I’ve built a generic DFID-styled theme to fit almost seamlessly into their corporate look and feel; but the defining elements – reverse-dated posts in categories, the floating comment box – are still there.

And significantly, we’ve moved from ‘normal’ WordPress to a WordPress MU (‘multi user’) installation. This brings several important benefits for DFID:
- the ability to create new sub-sites in a matter of seconds, through the WP interface;
- centralised management of platform / plugins / themes;
- one sign-on for all blogs on the system: OK, it’s not ‘single sign-on’ via LDAP or anything, but it’s a start!
- varying levels of user permission: you can give someone ‘admin’ status on a sub-site, and still keep the most dangerous options at the higher ‘site admin’ level;
- once it’s in, you can avoid all the usual IT Department headaches – DNS being a particular problem, I’ve found;
- and yes, it’s also cheaper for them in the long run. They no longer need to hire me to set these things up for them. (D’oh!)
Now having said all that, working with MU isn’t without its issues. Historically it didn’t get quite the same love and attention that ‘normal’ WordPress got; although to be absolutely fair, the delay between ‘normal’ releases and the matching MU releases has been cut right down. Some of its processes and language could be clearer: for example, when is an admin not an admin? When he/she’s a site admin, of course. And how do you make someone a site admin? You type their username into a text box under Options, naturally. (That took me a l-o-n-g time to figure out.)

Coincidentally, as I’m writing this, I get a tweet from COI’s Seb Crump: ‘@simond what’s the tipping point for considering WPMU? Plans for maybe up to 3 blogs eventually, but their launches spread over next 2+years‘

For me, it’s not particularly about the number of blogs being managed: it’s about the convenience of using the single installation. If those benefits I bullet-listed above are of interest to you, then MU is worth doing even if you’re only planning on having two blogs. Particularly in a corporate context, it means you can delegate quite a lot of responsibility to individual staff or departments, whilst still being able to wade in as and when. (And with automated upgrading now built-in, I’d say that’s a bigger issue now than it was previously.) But be warned, MU does have a learning curve. Even as a (normal) WordPress veteran of several years experience, it still beats me sometimes.

But in a 2+ year timespan, it ultimately won’t matter. It was announced in late May 2009 that ‘the thin layer of code that allows WordPress MU to host multiple WordPress blogs will be merged into WordPress’; I don’t believe there’s a confirmed timetable for it, though. That should mean that the MU elements get raised to the same level of perfection as in the ‘normal’ product: unquestionably a good thing, I’d say.

Anyway, back to the DFID project. I’m delighted with the first site to be built on the platform: and the DFID guys have done a great job dressing it up with imagery – it makes a huge difference. But the really exciting part, for me, will be seeing the next one get built. And the next one. And the next one.
4 Aug 2009

e-government, technology

birmingham, capita, foi

Birmingham's new website: how late? how much?

I don’t usually cover local government issues here – I leave that to other people. But I’ll make an exception for the news that Birmingham City Council is poised to launch a new website.

It was originally scheduled to launch in March 2006, at a cost of £580,000. It is now set to launch in August 2009 – so a mere three and a half years late?! – at a cost of, wait for it… £2.8 million.

The truth came out in an FOI request lodged by Heather Brooke, the ‘unsung hero‘ of the MPs’ expenses row, using MySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow website. (And if you’re ever asking for similar information, you could do worse than copy and paste her letter to Birmingham.) The council’s reply, embedded below, reveals that the original £580k project was intended to last 7 months; its scope was then formally ‘modified’, moving the date back by two and a half years (!). Subsequent revisions and delays bring us to August 2009.

And here, this’ll make you laugh. Even after all that time, even after all that money, the Birmingham Post reported last month that the latest delay was because ‘officials discovered the software did not recognise pound or euro signs, apostrophes and quotation marks’.

For the sake of the good people of Birmingham, and I speak as a former resident… I sincerely hope it proves to have been worth the wait. And the money.
30 Jul 2009

e-government, technology

pressoffice, rss, wordpress

RSS usage on Whitehall's websites
How many central government websites offer RSS feeds these days? The good news is that of the 20 departments represented in the Cabinet, I could only find one that didn’t. But it was a bit of a surprise to see how few offered ‘full text’ feeds, as opposed to ‘summary only’.

I visited each of the 20 departments listed on the Parliament web page – the top result in Google for ‘UK cabinet ministers’, looking for a main RSS news feed. Here’s what I found:
- There are explicit references to RSS feeds on 18 of the 20 sites: the exceptions are the Scotland Office and Defra. There is a Defra feed if you know where to look (namely COI); but how many would know to look there? That leaves the Scotland Office as the only department completely lacking an RSS feed for departmental news. (Its Secretary of State, Jim Murphy does have a blog, but I’m not counting that here.)
- Five of the 20 fall back on the feeds produced by COI’s News Distribution Service. That leaves 14 of the 20 producing their own feeds – in most cases, in addition to the feeds at COI.
- Only one, FCO, directs people through Google’s Feedburner service.
- Only 3 of the 20 provide ‘full text’ RSS feeds – allowing people to read the full press release (etc) instantly, and opening up the possibilities for easy information re-use (ie ‘mashups’). The rest require people to ‘click through’ to a page on the originating website. This is common in commercial publishing, where on-page advertising is a key driver.
- Of the 3 offering ‘full text’, 2 are running on WordPress: Number10 and the Wales Office, both of which I admittedly had some involvement in. The other one is DECC.
- The Department of Health’s RSS feeds aren’t valid: the ‘link’ element quoted in the feed doesn’t include www.dh.gov.uk. A curious problem to have caused yourself, and a trivial one to fix. I’ve mentioned this before, in the context of Directgov; and of course, the two share a publishing platform. A broken one, in this case.
- It was a pleasant surprise to see the majority of sites have ‘autodiscovery tags‘ in the header of their homepages – a behind-the-scenes way of indicating that a site has an RSS feed, which can (for example) light up an icon in the browser interface. But 8 don’t. I’m looking at you FCO, Home Office, Defra, DFID, Cabinet Office, Defence, Transport, and DCMS. Some of them have the appropriate tags deeper into the site, to be fair… but it’s a free and instant win those sites are missing out on.
The thing is, it’s so easy to get RSS right. Ask any blogger: when executed properly, RSS feeds should be an automatic, never-even-think-about-it thing. Each time a new item becomes available on a site, it should just drop into the RSS feed, notifying people – and importantly, mechanical services – of its availability.

And the easiest way to get RSS right is to build your news website on WordPress. Out of the box, you get valid RSS feeds for virtually any view of your site’s news content. Feeds by category / press office desk / minister? By keyword tag… or combinations of keyword tags? How about infinitely customisable feeds, based on search queries? Yes, to all of those. Probably within a couple of days, if you get the right people in. (Hint hint.)

A lot of government websites are going to need a rethink following the next election. It’s the ideal opportunity to upgrade the news area, by moving to a system that’s been explicitly designed around the timely publication of short text articles, generally presented in chronological order. By which I mean, a blogging system. And specifically, WordPress.
28 Jul 2009

e-government, technology

bis, neilwilliams, twitter

Twitter strategies: the boring bit

Anyone who finds Neil Williams’s 20-page Twitter strategy especially newsworthy clearly hasn’t spent much time inside Whitehall. Then again, with Parliament having just closed for its summer holiday, I guess the Westminster hacks had to find something to keep themselves busy.

So anyway, a week ago, Neil published a template for a departmental Twitter strategy on his own personal website, and on the Cabinet Office’s new Digital Engagement blog. Somebody in SW1 finally spotted it – the Guardian? Press Association? – then next thing you know, it’s everywhere. Incidentally, well done to the Daily Mail for inventing some extra details – it wasn’t ‘commissioned’, Neil chose to ‘open source’ the piece he produced for his own purposes for the benefit of colleagues elsewhere in government.

Yes, Neil’s document is lengthy; and he admitted from the off that it would seem ‘a bit over the top’. But if exciting new tools like Twitter are to make it through the middle-management swamp of the Civil Service, they need to be wrapped in boring documentation like this. Whether or not it ever gets read, mandarins need to feel that your Twitter proposal has received the same proper consideration as the other (weightier?) items on their to-do list. ‘Dude! This is so cooool! We should so be doing this!’ will not get you very far.

Getting government to do cool stuff is 50% actual doing, 50% creating the opportunity for things to get done. Neil’s document is aimed at the latter; and it would seem to have served its purpose already. Thanks Neil.

By the way… This provides an interesting case study in how news is made. It only becomes ‘news’ when one journalist notices. Then everyone else writes almost identical articles, usually based on the Press Association piece. Then it makes the broadcast media – starting with the Today programme. Expect the TV channels to follow suit later today.
22 Jul 2009

politics

buildingbritainsfuture, civilservice, labourparty

Who exactly owns 'Building Britain's Future'?

If you take any interest whatsoever in stuff the government puts out, you’ll have seen the Building Britain’s Future logo a lot lately – it’s even replaced the big 10 on the Number10 website‘s header. It’s a cross-department brand intended to show the government has a positive programme of work in these negative times.

It’s a risky strategy, given that we’re less than a year away from a general election – inviting potentially unhelpful use of the word ‘manifesto’ (eg Guardian). And yes of course, it’s sailing close to the wind, like all governments do on occasions. But in and of itself, I don’t have an inherent problem with government packaging its plans for the next year (and beyond) under a pretty logo.

Then earlier this week, I saw this:

That’s the front page of the Labour Party website. And there it is, right up front – ‘Building Britain’s Future’ in large letters, the same logo in the corner.

Now look, I’m not naive. Of course ‘Building Britain’s Future’ is an attempt to reinvigorate the Labour administration. Of course a governing party will always have one eye on its electoral chances, all the more in the final year of the Parliament, all the more when they’re badly behind in the polls. But this is pushing their luck too far.

The BBF website links to the Cabinet Office terms and conditions, which state quite clearly:

Copying our logos or any other third party logos from this website is not permitted without approval from the relevant copyright owner.

So is this an infringement of copyright by the Labour Party? Or a breach of the Civil Service Code, clause 14 – using official resources, specifically graphic design, for overtly party political purposes? Was permission sought to re-use the logo, and was permission granted? (I’ve emailed the Cabinet Office to ask, and will let you know if/how they reply.)

It’s fundamentally wrong that these questions should even have to be asked. Labour should do the decent thing, and get the logo off the website immediately. The Civil Service should think carefully about political impartiality, and stand up in its defence if necessary.

Update, 30 July: I’ve received the following response from the Cabinet Office: ‘We are happy for another website to highlight government initiatives, provided that it is clear that they are government initiatives. The Building Britain’s Future story has been carried by a number of third party organisations in this way.’

That doesn’t quite answer the question I posed, as to whether Labour ever asked permission. And if there’s a page explaining these different usage rules for the Building Britain’s Future logo, exempting it from the standard T&Cs, I haven’t found it.
20 Jul 2009

company, technology

cardiff, mattmullenweg, wordcampuk, wordpress

WordCamp UK 2009: seriously good

I can’t underline enough how enjoyable, educational and thought-provoking this weekend’s second WordCampUK was: over 100 people, including a large local contingent, gathering in Cardiff Bay for two packed days of WordPress talk, a bit of food, quite a lot to drink, and nowhere near enough sleep.

Last year in Birmingham, it felt amateur – and I mean that in both the positive and negative senses of the word. It was a bit like a first date. Fun and exciting, with some unforgettable moments, and clearly the start of something special – but acutely embarrassing in places. (Oh, and an incredibly vicious Twitter backchannel.)

All so different this year. Bigger and better presenters with bigger and better stories to tell, and a definite sense that we’re shifting up the gears, really quite quickly. And the Twitter chat was much nicer too.

The highlight, inevitably, was the appearance of Mr WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg. Charming, charismatic, cool and – I’m not ashamed to admit this – cute. Rather than give his almost traditional ‘State of the Word’ lecture, he took questions from the floor… and it was inspirational stuff.

I’ll take away a few specific things from what he said. His description of WordPress as a platform comparable to Windows or MacOS, given the number of plugin ‘programs’ written for it. His perfect ease at calling WordPress a CMS. His unexpectedly complimentary tone regarding Drupal. But most of all, the purity of his philosophy, and the strength of his commitment to it. I expected to detect a sharp business edge to his remarks (cf Zuckerberg); in the end, I was relieved not to.

We had many references, particularly through day one, to government use – and indeed, Matt confirmed that the UK and Brazil are the two countries where government buy-in is highest. So no pressure on me, then, for my Sunday lunchtime slot on the government picture – lessons learned from the number10.gov.uk launch, and the many ripples spreading out from that (which I’ll write up separately). I was my usual bouncy, passionate self, and it seemed to go down well: somebody described me as the WordPress community’s Jamie Oliver, which I’ll take as a compliment. Pukka!

Whereas last year saw a lot of people presenting their hobby sites, this year seemed to be entirely professional examples. But it didn’t stop speaker after speaker handing over their tips and advice – to put it another way, their trade secrets. So whilst WordPress is unquestionably becoming a serious product, and a serious business, it remains a supportive community. It’s Us versus Them – with Them being different things or people at different times. (I should have made a list.)

I’ll admit, I went to WordCamp looking for an answer to a difficult question. I’m making my living from WordPress, and I can see a proper industry starting to take shape around it: so what should I be doing about it?

One answer was Matt Mullenweg’s hippy philosophy, without which we wouldn’t be here in the first place, of course. Betfair’s Nick Garner, meanwhile, framed it all as a commercial opportunity, with the proposal for a ‘WordCon’ spinoff event pitching WordPress (and us as WordPress experts) to corporate clients. It led to some, ahem, heated debate.

Maybe Matt needs to grow up. Maybe Nick totally misses the point. Maybe they’re both right in different ways. My question remains unanswered, but I’m all the more convinced that it’s the right question to be asking, and the right moment to be asking it.

Pic by Mark, @cMadMan: that’s me at the front, waving a can of Red Bull Cola at the good people of WordCamp.
20 Jul 2009

e-government

downingstreet, twitter

Congratulations @downingstreet

It doesn’t matter how they got there, and it doesn’t matter if a significant proportion are spammy. The @downingstreet Twitter account hit one million followers on Sunday afternoon – making it surely the biggest e-government hit in a couple of years at least. At zero setup cost. And zero marketing spend.

The question is – still – what do we do with them all?

For anyone needing background, here’s an easy link to all the posts I’ve written on the subject. To anyone I met WordCamp who’s reading this: check out the URL construction. Did you know you could do that??
17 Jul 2009

company, politics

bloggerscircle, matthewtaylor, rsa, wordpress

Puffbox builds RSA's Bloggers' Circle
Some of the most fun projects come out of the blue. I’ve been following RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor’s blog for some time, and noted with interest his idea back in May to start some kind of ‘bloggers’ circle’. ‘There are too many bloggers and not enough readers so genuinely good posts can fall between the cracks,’ he wrote – correctly. So he suggested a ‘club’ whereby members would circulate their best posts, and would commit to writing about other members’ contributions.

Then I got an email from Taylor’s ‘old chum’ Matt Cain, asking if I could help them build a website for the project. Matt sent me a logo, a rough set of wireframes – and a very tight deadline. We managed to turn the website around within a couple of days, and it went live today at bloggerscircle.net.

It’s built on WordPress. OK, you didn’t need me to tell you that. But it’s got a couple of clever little touches, which probably won’t be immediately obvious.
- When people sign up to join the circle, we need their name, a website URL and a contact email address. And when you’ve built as many WordPress sites as I have lately, that combination of form fields says only one thing – comments. So that’s how we’re handling the registrations, as comments on a (dummy) page. Using the built-in functionality, the coordinator receives an alert email each time someone signs up (ie submits a comment); and like any comment, it’s a one-click process for him to accept or reject.
- There’s an RSS feed of ‘highlights’ from the Circle, which we’ll be running through Delicious, but I also wanted to offer a feed of each signup. We’ve done this, rather cheekily, using a custom page template containing a custom comment loop. It calls the comments (for a different page, incidentally), and presents the comment author’s details into an RSS template, rather than an HTML template. The title and content of that page aren’t wasted; we use these for the feed’s channel info.
- And then, just to complete the Automattic connection, we call that same custom comment loop to generate the ‘rogues gallery’ of Gravatars that appears at the top of each page. In these early days, a lot of people don’t have Gravatars associated with their email addresses; but we hope they’ll see the good reason to do so.
Having just come out of the longest project in company history, it was a real delight to take this on, and turn it around so quickly. I’m quite pleased with the presentation, particularly the way the membership itself is the focus of the page; and it’s always fun to do things with WordPress technology that it wasn’t ever really meant to do. A few rough edges have appeared since launch – inevitable given the sheer lack of testing time, but nothing we can’t handle.

Taylor – whose blog really has become excellent reading – is frank about the project: ‘We are starting small and maybe we won’t succeed but it’s always worth having a dream.’ But he continues: ‘Imagine if there were hundreds or even thousands of amateur bloggers signed up.’ Well, er… if that happens, that design will have a few problems – but as they say, they’ll be nice problems to have.
17 Jul 2009

e-government

datasharing, freeourbills, houseoflords

Free our data, says Lords info committee
I blogged previously about the House of Lords Information Committee’s inquiry into ‘People and Parliament‘: their final report came out this week, and couldn’t really have been more in favour of the ‘free our bills‘ agenda. Among its recommendations, as listed in the press release:
- information and documentation related to the core work of the House of Lords should be produced and made available online in an open standardised electronic format (not pdf) that enables people outside Parliament to analyse and re-use the data
- the integration of information on Parliament’s website, eg biographical info on Members to be linked to their voting record, their register of interests, questions tabled, etc
- Bills should be presented on Parliament’s website in a way that makes the legislative process more transparent and easier to understand
- an online system enabling people to sign up to receive electronic alerts and updates about particular Bills
- a requirement on the Government to start producing Bills in an electronic format which both complies with ‘open standards’ and is readily reusable
- an online database to increase awareness of Members’ areas of expertise
- an online debate to run in parallel with a debate in the Lords Chamber
- greater access to Parliament for factual filming
- a trial period during which voting in the Lords is filmed from within the voting lobbies
- all public meetings of Lords committees to be webcast with video and audio
- a review of the parliamentary language used in the House of Lords to make it easier for people outside the House to understand
But there’s a lot more good stuff in it than just that (!). I note in particular the recommendation to take the Lords Of The Blog website further – incidentally, its recent facelift is a dramatic improvement (and I’ll be mentioning it in my WordCamp talk at the weekend); and the explicit commitment to allow people to embed video clips on their own websites, in a direct challenge to the existing (YouTube-centric) ban. (In fact, in their list of ‘action already taken’, they say ‘We have approved members uploading their contributions to the House’s proceedings onto YouTube.’ – so maybe the ban’s gone already, at least on the Lords’ side?

Never let it be said that politicians as a whole don’t get it.
14 Jul 2009

e-government, technology

civilservice, internetexplorer

Govt depts in no rush to upgrade from IE6

Former e-government minister Tom Watson has tabled a string of Parliamentary Questions, asking various government departments what plans they have to upgrade their default web browser from Internet Explorer v6. The answers are starting to come in, and they aren’t pretty.

… no plans to change …

… in the process of reviewing the options… no decision as to which web browser the Department will update to or when any update might take place …

… currently reviewing our options …

… the upgrade to IE is planned to be completed prior to Microsoft ceasing to support IE6 …

But the most depressing response so far comes from the Ministry of Defence:

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is currently implementing the Defence Information Infrastructure (Future) (DII(F)). DII(F) will, once delivered in full, incorporate around 140,000 terminals supporting some 300,000 users at over 2,000 defence sites worldwide, including on ships and deployed operations. DII currently uses Internet Explorer 6 and at the current time does not have a requirement to move to an updated version.

So maybe it’s worth running through precisely why it’s such a bad thing that government departments aren’t being systematically moved off IE6. It’s partly technical, partly design – but mostly, I think, it’s the symbolism of departments refusing to move forward.

On the technical front, IE6 has security holes that just aren’t being fixed. Analysts Secunia say there have been 10 security alerts in the last year; and that there are 21 unresolved problems. Now to be honest, day-to-day, this probably doesn’t amount to much more than a theoretical risk, but it’s a risk nonetheless.

It’s also slow: IE8 is twice as fast at running Javascript, whilst the latest versions of Firefox and Google’s Chrome are at least 4x faster. This hasn’t mattered much until the explosive growth of Ajax techniques in the last year or two. But now, a lot of the revolutionary ‘web 2.0’ sites simply aren’t usable on IE6. And with more and more stuff happening in the web browser (‘G-Cloud’?), it’s only going to get worse.

Then there’s the design issues. Most web design these days is (or should be) based entirely on CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. And frankly, IE6’s handling of CSS is appalling. Ask any web designer, they’ll tell you the same story:

If you follow the W3C rules, designs will generally work perfectly (ish) first time on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and in all fairness, IE8. Then you hold your breath, and test it in IE6… and goodness knows how it’ll come out. Things might be the wrong size, or in the wrong place, or might not be visible at all. The layout you spent weeks crafting could be a complete mess. You then have to spend ages bastardising your code, often breaking those W3C rules – and sometimes defying all logic! – to make it come out right, or near enough, in IE6. It takes time, it costs clients money, and it makes designers sad.

In reality, everyone in the industry knows this. We’ve been living with it for long enough, and we’ve all got our various workarounds. We factor the IE6 delay into our timescales. We know not to be too ambitious sometimes, ‘because it’ll never work in IE6’.

But the reason it’s such a sore point for us government hangers-on is that IE7 (released in October 2006) is free of charge, and Microsoft’s formally recommended course of action is to upgrade. Dammit, that’s what HM Government itself tells people to do. Yet departments are quite happily burying their heads in the sand – ignoring the sound technical, financial and qualitative reasons for upgrading.

They think doing nothing is the safe option. They’re wrong.