2010 – Page 5 – Puffbox

3 Sep 2010

company

Back in business

Thanks, everyone for going easy during the month of August. I haven’t said much about why I took the time off, and don’t propose to: trying to maintain a distance between my private and professional lives. But one word of advice: don’t, under any circumstances, ask me if I enjoyed my ‘holiday‘. Totally the wrong word.

I haven’t been able to tear myself away completely from the technology: to do so these days would be almost impossible, especially when you run your own shop, especially when you’re its only employee. But putting ‘proper’ work on hold has allowed me to play with various things I wouldn’t otherwise have found time for.

Primarily to keep my pre-school daughter entertained one wet afternoon, I splashed out on a Polaroid Pogo mini printer. For £25 or thereabouts, you get a little unit roughly the size of your hand, which prints little colour stickers via Bluetooth. The quality’s so-so, the pictures are tiny, and like old-school Polaroid photos, the blank media is far from cheap… but there’s just something cute about it. I’m seeing plenty of potential uses in the business, not least printing my own custom laptop stickers. 😉

I’ve accepted that my first-gen Asus Eee netbook is now effectively disposable, and have started doing dangerous things with it. I’ve had two or three different flavours of Linux on it in the past month: currently trying Jolicloud. Its blurring of the lines between on-board and cloud-based apps doesn’t feel quite finished; but it’s a nice netbook-friendly front-end on Ubuntu, prettier than the official ‘remix’, and that’s good enough for the moment.

I’ve recoded the puffbox.com theme, although I doubt anyone else will notice. I’m planning a more thorough redesign of the site at some point, and the shift to the same CSS framework I’m using for all my client work these days will help, when the time (finally) comes.

And after much deliberation, I’ve switched my TV and broadband from Sky to Virgin. For roughly the same price, the Virgin package gave me 2-3x faster broadband, HD telly (although I remain to be convinced by it), big-screen iPlayer (etc) and the ESPN family of channels – worth having, as an ice hockey fan. But so far, it’s the 4000-odd music videos on demand which have been the unexpected pleasure of the package.

The work wheels started turning again a couple of days ago, and I’ve got a few very interesting projects in the works. Watch for a significant announcement early next week.
3 Aug 2010

e-government

coalition, consultation

Commenting is not crowdsourcing

I’ve noticed a lot of people getting quite agitated by this Guardian piece about how the Programme for Government ‘crowdsourcing’ (sic) exercise has ended ‘without a single government department expressing a willingness to alter any policy’.

Now, I’m speaking for nobody but myself here – but what the Guardian piece doesn’t fairly reflect is that it was not a crowdsourcing exercise, nor even a consultation.

It was the definitive statement of the outcome of negotiations between the two parties currently forming the country’s coalition government. It was not ‘give us some ideas for what you think we might have agreed.’ The comment box provided an opportunity for people to voice opinions or ask questions, and government promised it would listen.

There was no commitment to take the responses back for a second round of coalition negotiations. To do so would have been quite ridiculous. So I’d argue that it’s entirely reasonable for the departmental responses to take the position of ‘well, we’ve heard what you say, but…’.
30 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, opensource

Open source policy: back where we started

It’s good to see the coordinated publication of departments’ responses to the Programme For Government exercise – including the Cabinet Office’s reponse on government transparency, which also covered the use of open source software:

We are committed to the use of open standards and recognise that open source software offers government the opportunity of lower procurement prices, increased interoperability and easier integration. The use of open standards can also provide freedom from vendor lock in. In September 2010, we will publish Guidance for Procurers. This guidance will ensure that new IT procurements conducted by Government, evaluate both open source and proprietary software solutions, and select the option offering best value for money.

Nothing much to get excited about, to be honest. I suppose it’s nice to see an acknowledgement of ‘the opportunity’ of achieving benefits. But it’s a little disappointing that it should close with a flat statement about evaluating both proprietary and open-source on ‘best value for money’ grounds alone – which leaves us right back where we started. I note there’s no reference the Maude statement, back in June, about departmental websites using open source ‘whenever possible’.
29 Jul 2010

e-government

adwords, google

NHS kills Google advertising

I noted back in February that NHS Choices had spent £2.7m in one year on pay-per-click advertising. Well, that’s all changed now: a PQ answer reveals that the Adwords budget has been cut by 100%.

In line with Government policy, NHS Choices no longer has any arrangement, or pays for any search engine activity. No commitments have been made with Google or any other search provider for ‘pay per click’ online marketing since the moratorium on marketing spend was put in place on 24 May 2010. NHS Choices used paid search activity to ensure that it reaches the widest possible audience, and that users can easily find clinically assured health information and access the services they need from Government.

(And sure enough, other top spenders like the Act On CO2 campaign have also scrapped their Adwords activity.)

In my February piece, I looked at two specific search terms – ‘stop smoking’ and ‘chlamydia’. The NHS site is still the top natural result for ‘stop smoking‘… although it comes beneath sponsored links to specific pharma products. The picture for chlamydia isn’t so great: the NHS site comes well down the first page of Google results – beneath the American CDC, interestingly. Time to ramp up the SEO activity.
29 Jul 2010

e-government

directgov

Directgov's £28m/yr to be cut by a third
For those interested in the move of Directgov, and its 172 FTE staff, back to Cabinet Office control, there’s loads more detail in an explanatory document published on the Parliament website. I say ‘published’: it’s been slipped out as a PDF on the little-known deposits.parliament.uk subsite.

The note confirms that ‘Directgov funding will be reduced by a third over the Spending Review period’, from £28.4m in 2010/11, ‘together with the funding for the digital teams based in the Cabinet Office.’

But alongside the nuts-and-bolts details of who pays for the laptops, there’s an interesting perspective on what Directgov’s actual role is:
Directgov‟s ongoing role is to enable government to:
- Reduce the deficit
- Encourage individual and social responsibility, through provision and sharing of information and services in an open and transparent way
- Enhance the role of social enterprises, charities and co-operatives in public services
27 Jul 2010

company, technology

ccg, ical, markpack, wordpress

New project adds iCal feed to WordPress 3

I’ve been working with well known LibDem blogger Mark Pack, whose day job is with PR company Mandate, to migrate the website of the Cancer Campaigning Group over to WordPress. It’s a fairly modest little site, and I was under orders to keep the design broadly as-was. But it’s got one specific feature I’m very excited about.

Nearly four years ago, I wrote about the increasing adoption of the iCal standard for calendar sharing. With Outlook 2007 set to embrace the format, I foresaw a rush of websites publishing event data in iCal feeds, allowing you to subscribe with a single click, and then see someone else’s dates alongside your own.

The, ahem, optimistic assessment would be that I was well ahead of the curve. Four years on, you’ll struggle to find many (mainstream) sites offering such feeds – although I’ve noticed a slight increase of late. The BBC, for example, had a feed of World Cup fixtures; the Arsenal site has a similar service for its new fixture lists, including the Reserves, Youth and Ladies teams. Why? Maybe it’s the growing prevalence of smartphones by Apple and Google, both of whom were quick to adopt the format.

And then suddenly, the opportunity presented itself to build an iCal-enabled site of my own. The Cancer Campaigning Group’s previous site had an ‘events’ section, although it wasn’t anything special. WordPress 3.0, released just over a month ago, includes the ability to create ‘custom post types’; and I only recently discovered its little-documented ‘add_feed’ function, introduced as far back as early 2007. A little jQuery on the front- and back-ends, and we had all the ingredients we’d need.

So I’ve written some code to create a custom post type called ‘Event’, and added it into the WP back-end interface. You enter event details just as you would enter a post or page, with a title, body text and optional excerpt. There’s a special ‘event type’ categorisation; and a pop-up date picker for simplicity and consistency.

Then to call the calendar into a page, you use a WordPress shortcode – [calendar]. You can also specify the range (past or future), and the view (simple text list or javascript-enabled grid), plus the ‘type’ (if you’re using them). This actually gives you remarkable flexibility, only some of which is obvious on the Cancer Campaigning Group site.

And of course – there’s the iCal feed. If you take the feed URL into your calendar app of choice, you should be able to subscribe to it. And then, as the site admin adds new events, these will simply appear alongside your own personal appointments.

It hasn’t been easy: and to be honest, I’m not entirely confident that we’ve captured and resolved all possible issues. The biggest problem has actually been with Google Calendar: Google caches the feeds for an indeterminate period, and there’s no apparent way to force a refresh. So if there’s an issue with your code, you may not realise for several hours; and it may take a further few hours for your fix to feed through. I’m also fairly sure that the code, as it currently stands, won’t scale too well.

So for now, I’m watching the Cancer Campaigning Group site to see what happens. If it goes OK, I’ve got a couple of much higher-profile clients waiting in the wings.
27 Jul 2010

e-government, politics, technology

geodata, google, maps, mysociety

Constituency maps in under a minute
Opening up geographic data is beginning to bear fruit. MySociety’s Matthew Somerville has just unveiled MaPit, ‘our database and web service that maps postcodes and points to current or past administrative area information and polygons for all the United Kingdom.’ What that means in practice is, postcode lookups and boundary data are now just a URL away.

(Quick update: actually, not for all the United Kingdom as it turns out – the following method doesn’t work for N Ireland. See Matthew’s comment below.)

Here’s a quick example, as much for my own future reference as anyone else’s. Let’s say you wanted to generate a map of a given MP’s constituency – say Lynne Featherstone in Hornsey & Wood Green:
- You need to find the appropriate reference number for the constituency: either by browsing the list of all constituencies, or searching for places whose names begin with Hornsey. Note – these will produce nasty-looking data files, rather than pretty HTML lists. Hunt through the code, and you’ll find:
  “65883”: {“codes”: {“unit_id”: “25044”}, “name”: “Hornsey and Wood Green”, “country”: “E”, “type_name”: “UK Parliament constituency”, “parent_area”: null, “generation_high”: 13, “generation_low”: 13, “country_name”: “England”, “type”: “WMC”, “id”: 65883}
- The ‘id’ is the number you need – in this case, 65883. The MySociety API now lets you call the geometry of that area, in – among others – Google Earth’s KML format, using the following URL. (Don’t worry about the ‘4326’ here: it’s a reference to the coordinate system being used, and won’t change in this context.)
  http://mapit.mysociety.org/area/4326/65883.kml
- Conveniently, Google Maps lets you enter a KML file’s URL as a search query, and it will draw it on a map. Even more conveniently, if you add ‘output=embed’ as a search parameter, it strips away everything but the map itself. So here’s an embedded map of Lynne’s constituency, pulled into an <iframe>. Look at the source code, to see how easy it is.
Boundary data generated by MaPit.mysociety.org which contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2010; Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2010 (Code-Point Open); National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2010 (NSPD Open).

And thankfully, it bears a close resemblance to this map on Lynne’s own website, which took me considerably longer to churn out.
22 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, directgov, dwp

Directgov returns to the Cabinet Office

I couldn’t help smiling at the news of Directgov going back to its original home in the Cabinet Office. Funny how things go full-circle: launched from within the Cabinet Office in April 2004, to COI (an ‘ideal location’) in March 2006, to DWP in April 2008, back to Cabinet Office in July 2010.

The Cabinet Office press release says it will ‘sit in the Government Communications team headed by Matt Tee’, with oversight from Francis Maude and Danny Alexander; but will also have celebrity input:

Today’s move puts new energy behind the drive to get more people and public services online. Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, will drive a transformation and redirection of Directgov as part of her role advising government on how efficiencies can best be realised through the online delivery of public services.

That’s quite a curiously worded sentence when you look at it. In terms of traffic at least, Directgov is doing well – so you could argue that a ‘transformation and redirection’ of Directgov would be breaking what has so far been a winning formula. But then comes the key word – ‘efficiencies’. I think we know what that means.

And so, Directgov continues to be shuffled around government every two years. But maybe now, with Matt Tee’s Cabinet Office government communications unit holding responsibility for all the key strands of activity, it’ll get the kind of clear, authoritative leadership it’s perhaps been lacking.

Let’s all meet up again here in 2012, and see how it went.
20 Jul 2010

technology

wordcampuk

WordCamp UK: the camaraderie, the controversy

I spent the weekend in Manchester at the annual WordCamp UK, which Puffbox was again proud to have sponsored. It brought together 150 people from all over the country – plus a few from further afield, much further afield in one or two cases. Not everything went well, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

It was immediately noticeable that the attendees were much more serious than in previous years. Year one, in Birmingham was amateur – in the positive sense of the word. There were signs of things getting more serious in Cardiff last year. This time, it was noticeable how many more people had come to talk about code – although having said that, we still had a good number of curious newbies.

It’s always tricky to attempt a summary of a multi-track event like this: you don’t know what was said in the sessions you didn’t attend. But from what I saw, a few topics stood out: custom post types, BuddyPress, and cash.

There’s no doubt that the community is excited by the potential opened up by Custom Post Types – which aren’t actually new in WordPress 3.0, but have now reached a point where they’re properly usable. (Well, almost – I’m using them for a forthcoming project, and have already spotted a few weaknesses.) People were starting to demo some examples, and it’s clear there’s plenty of fun to be had with them.

BuddyPress was causing similar excitement last year, but there’s definitely a bit more perspective being applied now. Although I like what I’ve seen of it, I haven’t yet done anything with it myself: I’ve just found it a bit overwhelming. I picked up a few hints that others have had similar experiences.

Beneath the surface of several sessions was the sometimes tricky issue of cash. Growing numbers of people, myself included of course, are making their livings on top of WordPress – via a combination of custom programming, design and support. I’ve never been one to buy ‘premium themes’, but it seems like the big players in that field are making serious money. And although nobody dared to tackle it head-on, there were many nods towards an argument which kicked off last week in WordPress World about premium themes and licensing terms. (Mark Jaquith’s post sums it all up beautifully.)

And then came The Controversy. The final wrap-up session descended into chaos, leading to a lot of people saying things they hopefully now regret – at least in terms of how they said it.

It boils down to this. A few people around the UK have, apparently, been keen to hold WordCamps of their own; but have felt unable to, due to the existence of a nationally-branded WordCamp UK. To some, this statement came across as an accusation that the UK-level event was deliberately preventing the growth of smaller groups. They saw it as an attempt to force an unsuitable US-style city-based model on the UK. The language got very emotional very quickly. It was genuinely horrific to watch.

Here’s the conclusion I’ve reached. If – and I stress, ‘if’ – the UK can support more than one WordCamp now, then I’d be very happy for that to happen. In which case, it may no longer be appropriate to have a UK-branded event. But the most important thing is that we have at least one such event in this country in the next 12 months – whatever it gets called.
12 Jul 2010

e-government

branding, coalition

Coalition brand identity

Back in May, I wrote a piece about consistent government branding. Given the benefits in terms of cost savings and strengthened identity, I suggested: ‘it’s an idea whose time has come, and will not come again for some time.’ A couple of months later – after several web projects, a print item or two, and now even public events – it looks like we’ve got one.

I’ve already told the story of how I put together the Programme for Government website in under 24 hours. In the early evening before publication the next morning, I received a PDF of the proposed print output – and could really only mimic it. There wasn’t going to be time to get approval for anything else. A 2:1 wireframe, white ‘page’ hovering on a very light grey background, extra large Times Roman text in the top left, green highlight colour, Gill Sans body font (where available). Nothing too clever on either the technical or aesthetic fronts.

We then had the initial Spending Challenge site, which looked almost identical, not surprising given that it used my original CSS code… followed by the two discussion apps based on Delib’s platform, both coded from scratch but again using the same defining elements – 2:1 wireframe, white page on grey, big Times New Roman logotype, Gill Sans where available.

(It was particularly amusing to see the Delib guys sticking with the page shadow effect. Well past midnight, amid last-minute doubts about the design lacking a certain something, I added this using CSS3’s box-shadow. It took a few seconds to add to the CSS; it looked OK, and my creative juices had run dry – I wasn’t going to come up with anything better. Lo and behold, it’s one of the style’s defining characteristics! – although to Delib’s credit, they went back and did it ‘properly’ as a repeating background graphic.)

And now I note the same style has even been translated into event scenery: witnessed first at the Cabinet away-day in the North, then again last Friday in Cornwall.

The outside observer would have to conclude that this is HMG’s new across-the-board House Style… or certainly, the makings of one. There’s a lot to like about it, not least its easy online application; there’s something inherently ‘British’ about Gill Sans, and the colour combination blends sobriety and dynamism quite well. But some refinement is still required: I don’t think we’ve found quite the right green, for example.