company – Page 4

6 Sep 2010

company, e-government, technology

wordcamp, wordpress

A ‘WordCamp’ for Whitehall

If you’re a civil servant working in UK central government, and you’re using WordPress (or seriously considering it), I’d like to invite you to an all-day event I’m coordinating for mid-October.

Each January, we have the UK government Barcamps, bringing together civil servants and external enthusiasts to talk about ‘web 2.0’, social media, or whatever it’s calling itself at the time. And for the past three summers, we’ve had WordCamp UK, a gathering of the UK’s WordPress developer community. Both have been excellent fora for idea sharing, and contact building.

In the meantime, we’ve seen steady growth in the use of WordPress within government – to the point now that it’s the natural choice for interactive applications, the expected solution for small-scale sites, and a serious option for larger-scale development.

And so, with WordPress maturing, departmental budgets tightening and Ministerial demands increasing, it feels like the right moment to mash the two together: an opportunity for those of us already using WordPress in government to show off our latest creations, float some new ideas, and share our experiences – good and bad.

With the generous support of the team at BIS, I’m organising a day-long WordCamp-style event for the extended family of government – civil servants and gov-centric consultants, plus a WordPress VIP or two.

It will take place on Wednesday 13 October, at a government office in the St James’s Park area, starting at 10.30am and finishing at 4pm – giving you enough time to clear your inboxes before and after. We’ll have room for around 30 civil servants – so please, a maximum of 3 attendees per department. There will be no charge for attending, and we’re hoping to provide a decent (off-site) lunch.

Like Barcamp, we’ll want the day’s programme to consist primarily of volunteers providing 20-25 minute presentations / demonstrations about projects they’ve been working on. So if you’re working with WordPress, please do take a slot to tell us all about it – even if it isn’t quite ready, even if it didn’t quite come off. Unlike Barcamp though, we’ll be doing our best to arrange the programme ahead of time.

In addition to the usual suspects on the consultancy side, we’ll also be joined by a few specially invited guests – including Peter Westwood, one of the core developers of WordPress (and soon to be working full-time for Automattic).

Book your place via Eventbrite – but please, do think about that three-per-dept limit. We’d like all interested departments to have the opportunity to send someone.

We’ll be coordinating the planning of the event using a group on the UKGovCamp.com site, built by Steph and Dave, and running on WordPress/BuddyPress 🙂 – so if you haven’t already registered for that site, please do so. Membership of the event group will be restricted to attendees (at least to begin with).

If you’re a supplier and you’d like to be involved, please contact me (with details of your WordPress and/or government experience). Be warned, strings are attached.

Any other questions, feel free to get in touch via the website, or leave a comment below.
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.
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.
2 Jul 2010

company

wordcamp, wordpress

Proud to be sponsoring WordCamp UK (again)

Puffbox is proud to confirm that we will again be sponsoring WordCamp UK, the annual gathering of the nation’s users and developers of WordPress. As things stand, we’re the only sponsor to have supported the event in each of its three years of existence.

This year’s event takes place on 17-18 July – yes, just a few weeks away; and we’re being hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University Business School – right in the heart of the nation’s computing capital (historically speaking at least!). As with last year, it’ll be a full two days, with sessions in two rooms simultaneously; and I’ll be doing a session on… er, something. Haven’t quite pinned it down yet.

‘Life-changing’ may be too dramatic a word; but certainly, good things have happened for me in the aftermath of both previous WordCamps that simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I’ve met new and interesting people; learned new things; pooled new ideas; developed working relationships; and formulated grand plans. And there’s every reason to believe that this year’s event will be similarly stimulating. That’s why Puffbox is continuing its sponsorship of the event: because, by throwing a few quid into the pot, we ensure it all happens again.

The running order (still in development) will include sessions led by leading lights of the UK WordPress community like Simon Wheatley, Mike Little and Dave Coveney; plus at least one person, possibly two, from WP’s parent company, Automattic; and Peter Westwood, one of the core development team behind WordPress. (Regular readers of this here blog might be interested to note quite a few speakers with public sector experience, too.)

If you’d like to join us – and you’d be most welcome, of course! – the tickets are a modest £20 each if you book now, rising to £30 after the weekend.
8 Jun 2010

company, politics

awards, libdems, lynnefeatherstone

Puffbox site wins election award

Front left: back of my head. Front right: back of Mark Pack's head.

This morning, shortly before 11am. I’m sitting in the waiting room at the local GPs’ surgery. Nothing serious; just a routine appointment for a family member. Things are running a bit late, as usual, so I casually start looking at Twitter.

An event about the internet and the election? Ah well, another of those London events I never get to attend. A report being published? Cool, I’ll read it tonight. Some awards? Always worth a look. I wonder who’ll win. Oh look, somebody’s leaked the results. Er… it appears I’ve won. And the train I need to catch is in 15 minutes. So, dedicated family man that I am, I abandon said family member in the waiting room, and (literally) make a run for the station.

The event marked the publication of Anthony Painter‘s excellent – although perhaps too diplomatic? – analysis of the digital election, brought to you in association with Orange. Whilst much of its content will be familiar to anyone reading this, there will certainly be a few examples you won’t previously have heard of. Well worth a read.

And I’m delighted to note that Puffbox client Lynne Featherstone was the unanimous winner of the day’s big award, for Best Use of Digital Campaigning by a Candidate, ahead of Anthony Calvert’s (ultimately unsuccessful) ‘castration’ attempt, and Walthamstow’s media-savvy Labour MP, Stella Creasy.

Anthony’s report is wonderfully complimentary about our work on Lynne’s site:

On every level, Lynne Featherstone’s campaign site excelled: design, engagement, relevance, information. It featured a ‘Lifestream’, which was basically a live feed of all of Featherstone’s social media and web engagements… Her campaign secured a swing of almost 4% against Labour against a national swing of 3.5% (though in London the swing from Liberal Democrat to Labour was only 1.25% so it’s an even better performance by that measure.)

In a brief chat afterwards, I couldn’t resist reminding Lynne that, at one of our first meetings, I’d promised we would deliver a website which would win awards. I’d said that because I’d meant it: an all-too-characteristic moment of wild optimism on my part. We’d actually had our eye on the then-annual BCS Awards for MPs’ websites; but they were cancelled last year… so this news comes as quite a relief, actually!

Lynne was very complimentary about me in her remarks; compliments I’m happy to return (and more). The site was designed entirely around her – her activities, her personality, her narrative, for want of a better word. I’ve since had a good number of enquiries from people asking ‘could we have a website just like Lynne’s’ – and I’ve said ‘no’ every time. (We’ve generally then gone on to design something equally attractive, but more appropriate.)

Once again, I must thank Jonathan Harris, who worked with me on the concept and design; and Mark Pack, who looked after a lot of the technical stuff at the constituency end – not to mention Helen Duffett and others on Lynne’s team. They’re a genuinely great bunch, and all deserve a slice of the recognition.

I can’t tell you how chuffed I am about this. And if I’d promised to do something for you today: sorry.
25 May 2010

company, e-government

cabinetoffice, coalition, coi, wordpress

Commentable Coalition plan

Out of the blue last week, I got a call from COI: was I available for an immediate, rapid turnaround WordPress job? I was a bit startled, and detail was lacking; but since this was precisely the kind of rapid-response thinking I’ve been trying to foster around WordPress for a couple of years, I couldn’t really say no.

As it turned out, the project in question was the Coalition Programme for Government: and the mission was to build a commentable version of it, by the next morning. COI’s initial proposal was to use Steph’s Commentariat as a base; but given the document’s structure, it didn’t feel like a good fit. Plus to be honest, I knew I’d be more comfortable working with my own code, as opposed to unpicking Steph’s – and time was too tight.

The theme came together fairly quickly, helped in no small part by the source document’s fairly plain design – which I basically mimicked, with a couple of tweaks for better web usability. Extracting the text from the supplied PDF was excruciating, as you’d expect. But by the time I got to bed at about 2.30am, having barely left the keyboard since lunchtime, the site was ready, and my part of the work was basically done. It went live at 9:30 the next – well, technically the same – morning.

Now… I’m going to skip over the next bit, because I’m not the right person to tell the story. Suffice to say, people came in their many tens of thousands. And although measures had been taken to handle the expected load, the platform wasn’t ready for quite that volume of interest.

But now, a couple of days older and wiser, the site has been re-enabled: and the comments are starting to come in. This in itself presents some interesting challenges: the document is, by its very nature, more party-political than most, and the comments will be too. The civil service’s usual get-out clause – about the government being democratically elected, on the basis of its manifesto (singular) – doesn’t really work this time. Thankfully, applying the moderation policy is someone else’s problem.

Of course it’d be nicer if things had gone perfectly smoothly on launch day. To some extent, we’ve missed the boat in terms of the immediate wave of interest; but arguably, the comments might be more considered, with the benefit of a weekend to reflect and cool off. (Well, not ‘cool off’ given the mini-heatwave, but you know what I mean.)

And regardless of what went wrong, there’s still a great story to tell, in terms of what went right. An interactive document, designed and coded from scratch, and delivered by bedtime. That’s why we love WordPress.
14 May 2010

company, e-government, technology

coi, defra, mikelittle, wordpress

Our emergency theme helps Defra relaunch

The biggest surprise about the transition to the new coalition administration is how few surprises there actually were. A quick tour of the departmental websites reveals, for the most part, the exact same websites that were there before – albeit a little lighter on content, and with new faces in the About Us section. It’s all gone commendably smoothly.

But one or two departments have taken advantage of the situation to revamp their web presences: and it’s been our pleasure to assist with one of these already – with more, perhaps, to follow.

In the run-up to Polling Day, we were asked by COI to provide cover for any ’emergency’ web building which might result from the arrival of a new administration. Steria provided a hosting environment, with WordPress MU pre-installed; and I worked with Zed1’s Mike Little to develop a theme which could be deployed and managed centrally, ideally very rapidly – but still be easily customisable for each individual site which used it.

In the end, there weren’t any major Machinery of Government changes which required it: but Defra recognised the opportunity, and are using it as a base on which to start rebuilding their corporate website. They’ve worked with Puffbox on a few WordPress-based microsites already this year, so it’s familiar territory for them – and in truth, I think it’s been coming for a while.

The theme is fairly plain, sober and generic: inevitably, given that we had literally no idea who might need to use it, or how. There’s a rather nice homepage carousel, managed via the WP media library; a widget-ised sidebar and ‘fat footer’; plus special page menus at the top and bottom. It makes for quite a nice little site: certainly enough to get things started.

But whilst the design itself might not win awards, the behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty smart. We’ve enabled WordPress’s ‘custom header’ functionality on the theme: users simply need to create a graphic of predefined dimensions, upload it into WP, and it’ll be used as a full-width banner across the top (with the search form and – optionally – department name overlaid). In Defra’s case, they’ve gone for a fairly plain black logo on white; but it could have been a lot more creative if they’d wanted. When we’ve tried this in test, we’ve found it can produce quite dramatically different ‘feels’ to the theme.

And then there’s the colour palette. The theme’s style.css file avoids defining most of the colours used on the page. Instead, there’s an options page in the WordPress backend, where you can enter the colours to be used for specific page elements: links, the ‘blobs’ in the sidebar and ‘fat footer’, and so on. These are saved in the database table of options for that specific blog only; and the custom CSS gets added to the top of each page as it gets generated. (It’s effectively an evolution of the work I did for BIS on Science & Society, but it takes the concept to a whole new level, and opens up all sorts of possibilities.)

But of course, the most significant aspect is the centrally managed hosting environment, and the official recognition of WordPress as a suitable tool for the job. Precisely what I’ve been proposing on these pages for ages. And you know what? I think it actually worked.
26 Apr 2010

company, politics

northernireland, simonwheatley, sluggerotoole, wordpress

Taking Slugger O'Toole to the next level

If you have any interest in Northern Ireland politics, you’ll be familiar with Slugger O’Toole. It’s by far the best known blog in the province, and manages to pull off the impressive feat of appealing to both sides of the sectarian divide – even to the point of winning awards at ceremonies in both the UK and the Republic. And as an Ulster exile myself, it’s a site I’ve followed for a long, long time.

Late last year, Slugger received investment from Channel 4’s 4iP fund, to take things to the next level. In practice, that meant an update to a design that was really showing its age; and a move from Expression Engine to WordPress. But things didn’t work out with their initial Belfast-based designer; and a few weeks ago, they got in touch to see if Puffbox could help. The no1 website from my part of the planet, wanting to move to WordPress? How could I possibly refuse?

The brief was to reflect the rough and robust nature of the site’s conversations; and pretty quickly,we found a visual style which seemed to strike the right note. But when it came to wireframing, we hit an interesting question: did Slugger want to be more of a blog or a news site?

Our initial templates were definitely more bloggy in nature, but they just didn’t feel right. Like a lot of sites, Slugger’s traffic has always been driven by news events. And as I think I’d always suspected deep down, we eventually concluded it had to be more newsy – and started again.

Most of the effort went into the homepage – and specifically the opening frame (or two), which could well be from a newspaper site, if it weren’t for the ‘torn edges’ effect. And therein lies the aspect of the project I’m most proud of: the self-managing ‘front page’.

If it was a newspaper, it would have an editor (or probably several) tasked with choosing the right order for the stories, tweaking the headlines, crafting snappy summaries, selecting suitable imagery, and so on. But Slugger is run by a loose bunch of volunteer contributors, and couldn’t commit to that kind of management overhead. So instead, we’ve programmed WordPress to select the stories, and sort them, based on a number of predefined rules.

It selects stories based on their date of posting, the editor’s manual identification of ‘important’ stories, whether or not it’s got pictures, and most interestingly, the volume of comments. So a story will almost always get some top-of-page exposure when it’s first published, but will soon drop ‘below the fold’. However, if it generates a good number of comments, it will jump back up to the top – and in all likelihood, even higher than before.

Sure, it’s not quite Digg or Google; but I think it’s interesting that the site’s readership can influence the homepage almost as much as the editor. And it seems entirely in keeping with the ethos of a site whose true strength is in its sense of community.

On the technical side, it’s been really pretty tricky. Thousands of already-registered users, tens of thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of comments – and the server procured by our predecessors on the project just wasn’t up to the task. Things were agonisingly slow on launch day, no matter how many magic tricks Simon Wheatley performed: so we had to make hasty plans to move it somewhere beefier (and as it turned out, cheaper). Thankfully though, we seem to be in calmer waters now.

Knowing the Slugger readership as I did, I feared the worst when it came to reader feedback. In fact, it’s been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to like the visual approach, and appreciate what we’re trying to achieve with it. We’re fixing the (relatively few) bugs which have arisen, and the contributors are getting used to the new interface and the new functions at their disposal. And of course, this is really only the start: having moved everything over into WordPress, all sorts of possibilities now open up.

Several gold stars go to Simon Wheatley, for going far beyond the call of duty on this one; and thanks to Matt at Dunston Graphics, for getting the design just right, and coping admirably with my outrageously late change of strategic direction.
13 Apr 2010

company, politics

libdems, lynnefeatherstone, splashpages, wordpress

Lynne Featherstone making a splash

When we launched the new Lynne Featherstone website back in September, our plan was always to add some new functionality once the campaign finally began (properly). One such feature went live tonight: ‘splash pages’, managed purely within WordPress.

I’ve developed a new custom page template, which – as you can see – expects to be used with a (very) large uploaded image, a paragraph or two of text, and a signup form (powered by Contact Form 7). To activate it, you simply change the ‘front page’ setting on the WordPress back-end.

When you view the page, it drops a cookie to ensure you won’t see that splash page again; but the cookie is specific to the page ID number, so it won’t stop you seeing the next one we do.

The template’s first appearance is to warn potential voters of the upcoming deadline for registration; so we’ve had to go abstract with the choice of imagery. Most of the time, I’d expect it to be a photograph – not least given Lynne’s recent recognition as the country’s most fanciable MP. WordPress has allowed us to make the page creation process remarkably quick and easy; so I’m hoping the team will be able to create a couple each week of the campaign, depending on events and available imagery.

By definition, splash pages are an annoyance – an unrequested interruption to your online journey. I’m not a fan of injudicious use of them. But based on this template, Lynne’s should be more substantial and useful than most; and we’re doing our best to minimise the inconvenience with persistent cookies. We’ll be watching to see how they are received.
12 Apr 2010

company, politics

chrishuhne, libdems, lynnefeatherstone, wordpress

Our new site for LibDems' Chris Huhne

With the election now well and truly underway, it’s high time I blogged about the latest website Puffbox has built for a high-profile Liberal Democrat – this time it’s home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne, as he looks to defend a wafer-thin majority in Eastleigh.

We were approached by Huhne’s team late last year: they’d seen what we’d done for Lynne Featherstone, and wanted us to do something similar for them. We soon ruled out a ‘carbon copy’ site: Lynne’s use of social media is exceptional, and the approach we took with her wasn’t going to be appropriate for Chris. Instead, we’ve shaped the site around Chris’s rather more conventional media output, but with plenty of scope to expand later, if or when required.

We’ve gone for a high-impact homepage, with a large image carousel highlighting a number of key local issues: and as with Lynne Featherstone’s site, each issue has its own explanatory page which can act as a hub for related posts. Unlike Lynne though, a large proportion of Chris’s work is at national level – so we’ve gone for a tabbed approach, allowing you to switch between national and local issues. (And using cookies, we’ll remember your preference for your next visit.)

Since his election in 2005, Chris had been running a website based on the Prater Raines platform used by the vast majority of Liberal Democrat people and local parties. (It’s actually an excellent technical solution; but it won’t win any design awards.) We’ve managed to bring across the vast majority of the previous site’s content, close to 1,000 pages, by screen-scraping: and whilst the new page addresses aren’t exact matches, they do all work seamlessly.

The site was built on WordPress, with just a little behind-the-scenes help from Simon Wheatley; it was designed in collaboration with Matt Budd of Dunston Graphics. I think he’s done a magnificent job with the LibDems’ somewhat troublesome preference for aqua and yellow.

There are a few areas, in both technical and editorial terms, where I wish we’d had just a little more time; but the declaration of the election forced our hand somewhat. So whilst I’m more than happy with what we’ve already delivered, I think we can make it even better in the months to come. Assuming the voters of Eastleigh give us the chance…