company – Page 6

18 Sep 2009

company, politics

libdems, lifestream, lynnefeatherstone, puffbox, wordpress

Presenting the new website for Lynne Featherstone MP

We’re proud to unveil our latest creation: a new website/blog for Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone (or try this link if the DNS hasn’t rolled over for you yet). It’s taken a good few months, and has thrown up challenges on a scale I haven’t had to tackle before. But equally, it presented several opportunities for cheeky innovation, and as you’ll know by now, I can’t say ‘no’ to those.

A bit of background. Lynne started blogging in October 2003, making her one of the first MPs to do so – although she wasn’t an MP at the time. And in fact, she specifically credits her website as a factor in her winning the Hornsey and Wood Green seat in 2005 (on a 14% swing). She was also the first MP to use Twitter, more or less. And she’s in charge of the LibDems’ online campaigning strategy. No pressure then.

We had five and a half years’ worth of blog posts in Blogger, with over 2,000 user comments, to be migrated to WordPress. Oh, and 2,000 hand-coded press releases from the local party branch, to be integrated too please. Plus accounts on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. And what about her contributions to other websites? Not to mention her activity in Parliament?

So the grand concept of the site is the use of a tabbed ‘lifestream‘ as the homepage. The initial view lists her last 10 actions, no matter where they happened – including Early Day Motion signatures, which required me to write my own scraper. Then, if you want to see her activity on one of those specific areas, you just click the appropriate tab. It’s all driven by RSS; the tabs are powered by ajax; the lists are generated by a cron for obvious reasons.

We’ve also made some first steps into Facebook integration. If you’re going to comment on the site, you can sign in with your Facebook credentials: this will pull your name and profile photo into the comment, and give you the option of adding an entry to your Facebook news-stream. I’ve used the official WordPress plugin, but it needed more tweaking than I probably expected, and didn’t always work reliably on all browsers. Let’s just say I’ll be keeping a close eye on it.

I’ve also used Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace API to create a clickable map of the wards which make up Lynne’s constituency, with the precise boundaries marked, and map detail down to individual building outlines. I shouldn’t need to explain why this might prove to have been an – ahem – interesting move. It’s ready, but we won’t be activating it immediately.

The effort that’s gone into the issue and ward pages probably won’t be evident on the front end: you get a short summary, plus the latest posts tagged accordingly, plus any ‘blogroll’ links, plus – where relevant/available – the latest posts from other related sites or blogs, again pulled in via RSS. But crucially, all of this is done using standard WordPress functionality, in such a way that Lynne and her team can create new pages instantly. No (deep) tech knowledge required.

Naturally, it’s got all the sorts of functions you’d expect from a WordPress blog: sidebar widgets, paged comments, RSS feeds, decent SEO, etc etc. We’ve done pretty well in maintaining addresses from the old site: 50 to 60% of the URLs, at a guess, accounting for the vast majority of site traffic. And if you ignore the issues with Facebook’s custom markup language, everything (I think) passes HTML validation. Hooray!

There’s so, so many people to thank on this one. Jonathan Harris, who happens to be a constituent of Lynne’s, for the design work. Matthew Somerville for tweaking something for me within TheyWorkForYou, plus a couple of people within Parliament who tried to help me with EDM RSS through the proper channels, but ultimately couldn’t. Ex-LibDem tech supremo Mark Pack. Lynne’s staff and councillor colleagues for their early feedback. And Lynne herself for trusting me in the early stages, and encouraging me in the later stages when I didn’t necessarily trust myself.

Every site I do, I always try to do something innovative. This time, there are just so many things that I’ve never done before myself, or that I’ve never seen on a website in the same field. It’s been exhausting, occasionally terrifying, but great fun to do. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.
15 Sep 2009

company

Crowdsourcing my business plan
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future direction of Puffbox. The company has been in existence for two and a half years, and things have gone pretty well. I’m consistently busy, with regular offers of interesting projects: sometimes too many offers, actually. The mortgage gets paid each month, and there’s no immediate threat to a pretty comfortable status quo. So I’m not worried as such; just keen to stay ahead of the game.

The ‘WordPress (etc) into government’ campaign seems to have been successful; partly through my own efforts, I hope. We’ve got some departments doing some really quite adventurous things, and others dipping toes into the water. There’s now a clutch of us freelancers / consultants selling our expertise into Whitehall, and a few instances of departments doing it for themselves. And with WordPress itself maturing as a product, it feels like we’re entering a new phase.

It’s a shift from ‘look what we can do’ to ‘how can we do it properly?’. A realisation that high-profile sites really can’t rely on individual developers, no matter how multi-talented – for the benefit of the developer as much as the client, possibly moreso even. The accumulation of a year or two of actual real-world experience.

I can see several possible directions Puffbox could take. But I’d like to get some input from those actually inside government: the clients, current and potential. What would be of most interest to you – practically, strategically, financially?
- More of the same. Keep doing what I’m doing, designing and building modest, innovative sites and apps. But bring in other similarly-skilled people to share the load. We’d continue to use off-the-shelf hosting services, or departments’ own arrangements. Sell the benefit of our longer experience: sure, you could do it yourself, but we’ll do it quicker and better.
- Move into hosting and support of WordPress sites – not just sites I/we build necessarily, either. ‘Business class’ rather than ‘coach’: expensive, but with a package of WP and plugin upgrading, security, etc etc to merit it. I’d need to form some kind of relationship with a tech guru or two; good news is, I know a few already.
- Focus on a couple of specific WP-based apps of specific interest to government. Perhaps a ‘press office’ function, skinnable to slot neatly into departmental sites. Or a locally-hosted Basecamp-style project management app. Or a UserVoice-clone. Or an online content aggregator. Or a ‘social intranet’ based on BuddyPress. Or a consultation platform. Hire them out for an ongoing fee, as opposed to selling a one-off deliverable.
- Develop an expertise in something new – RDFa? Data/API? Geo/mapping? Emailing? Video hosting? Possibly WordPress related, possibly not.
- Does it weaken the ‘government expertise’ pitch if I start to look at more political or commercial work?
It could be one of the above, or several at once, or something completely different. But I can’t shake the feeling that now is the right time to be doing something. What would you want from me, guys?

If you don’t feel comfortable commenting publicly, drop me an email. And remember, I never refuse the offer of a coffee.
26 Aug 2009

company

opensource, plugin, robots.txt, wordpress

WordPress plugin: Robots.txt Reminder

I’m sure we’ve all done it. You’re creating a new WordPress installation, and for a bit of privacy whilst you build the thing, you choose not to ‘allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati’. But in the rush to get the site out the door, you forget to switch the setting to make it ‘visible to everyone, including search engines’.

So I’ve created a laughably simple WordPress plugin called ‘Robots.txt Reminder’, which adds a notification message to the top of all Admin pages if it detects that (a) your blog is set to block search engines, and (b) your user capabilities allow you to make the change. It’s kinda hard to ignore, but that’s kinda the point.

Click here to download robotreminder.zip, then – assuming you’re using one of the more recent versions of WordPress, and are able to do automated updating – upload the zip file as-is, by clicking on Plugins -> Add New -> Upload.

It’s not the first plugin I’ve ever coded, but it’s the first plugin I’ve ever ‘released’ like this, so please be gentle. 🙂
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.
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.
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.
7 Jul 2009

company, e-government

bis, dfid, wordpress

Puffbox's social intranet for government

Last week, we finally completed the longest-running and most ambitious WordPress-based project in Puffbox history. Back in February, with snow on the ground, we started developing the concept of a self-contained ‘social intranet’ platform to be used by staff across government – DFID, BERR (as was), FCO and elsewhere – involved in the many facets of trade work. And with temperatures soaring at the end of June, we finally saw the site get off the ground.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my career, but I’ve never seen an intranet I didn’t dislike. So the opportunity to design one, based on the experience of the 2.0 Years, was quite appealing. Inspired in particular by the work of Jenny Brown and Lloyd Davis at Justice, we based our thinking on the notion of an RSS dashboard. Since the biggest problem with most intranets is that they aren’t reliably updated, we thought, why not build an intranet that updates itself? So at its heart, the site is a huge RSS archive – pulling in news releases and media commentary from UK government, international organisations, expert analysts and humble bloggers. And since it’s all sitting on top of a WordPress MU installation, it’s easy for us to make each item commentable – on the platform itself, rather than at the originating site.

Of course, there’s a risk of information overload. So we’ve built a ‘collaborative editing’ function – along the lines of Google Reader’s shared items, but done as a group thing. If you read something which you think your colleagues ought to see too, you click the star icon, and it gets promoted to a ‘daily highlights’ list on the site homepage. Then, at the end of each day, there’s a Daily Email which rounds up all the ‘starred items’ – so even if you never look at the website, and we’re realistic enough to accept that some won’t, then you can still get the benefit from it.

We’ve used various WordPress plugins to add calendar functionality; to allow users to upload (non-restricted) documents; to put their faces against their contributions, making the place feel a bit more human; and even to allow senior staff to blog on the site via email. You could probably accuse us of throwing the entire 2.0 playbook at the project, and you’d be absolutely right. But apart from the core aggregation and recommendation functionality, everything else uses off-the-shelf open-source plugins, installed and configured (generally) within a few hours. So if they don’t work out, what have you lost?

This project has taken up most of my time for the past four months; working with my regular co-conspirators Simon Wheatley and Jonathan Harris, we’ve pushed the boundaries of the technology, and tested the limits of the civil service mindset. Although many of the individual elements have been tried before in government, I believe it’s the first time anyone’s tried to do all of it, all together – and crucially, all on an in-house system, which opens up some very interesting possibilities. (And yes, as ever, you might be pleasantly surprised by the price tag, too.)

So is this finally an intranet I like? I’ll offer a provisional yes for now, but maybe it’s better to ask me again in a few months. Since it’s a closed system, there’s limited scope for me to demo it… but if it’s something you might be interested in, ask me very nicely, and I’ll see what I can do.
11 May 2009

company, politics, technology

libdems, nickclegg, wordpress

Nick Clegg's off-the-shelf redesign
There’s a new look to NickClegg.com, ‘the official Leader’s site for the Liberal Democrats’, powered – as noted previously – by WordPress. And it isn’t yellow, not in the slightest. In fact, it took me quite a while even to spot the party’s bird logo, concealed in each instance behind signatures or other graphic elements.

This isn’t like any Liberal Democrats web design you’ve seen before… because basically, it isn’t a LibDems web design. It’s an ‘out of the box’ installation of the (free) Revolution Office theme for WordPress… seen here in its raw form.

Of course, on one level, this is another reminder of the power of WordPress. Redesigning your entire website is as simple as finding a theme you like, downloading it, and pressing the ‘activate’ button. A few minutes tweaking the settings, and you’re done. So quick, so easy, so cheap. Plus, depending on the theme author, a guarantee (of sorts) that your site will keep working, no matter what changes happen in forthcoming WordPress upgrades.

But I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with ‘off the shelf’ design like this. As soon as I understood how, I stopped using third-party themes, and started coding my own. Several reasons for doing so, I think:
- A need to understand what’s happening under the hood… in case something goes wrong, and you’re called on to fix it. I don’t think you can get that from ‘plug and play’ theming.
- Something instinctive about branding. Your brand identity is meant to be a representation of you, what you do, and why you do it. Deep down, I don’t really believe it can be ‘you’ if you’re just pouring yourself into someone else’s mould. It can’t have soul unless it started from scratch.
- Total customisability. No matter how good an off-the-shelf theme might be, I can’t believe it’ll cover every possible requirement a client might throw at you. So you’re going to end up getting your hands dirty with code anyway; and if it’s your own code in the first place, it should be much easier. (See point one.)
- Fraud risk. Yes, you use off-the-shelf because it makes it much easier for you. But equally, it makes it easy – far too easy – for someone else to grab a ‘lookalike’ domain, download the same theme, and build (in effect) a ‘phishing’ site.
(The only exception is the production of sites based on Steph’s Commentariat theme: as I’ve described before, I personally think it’s important – for now at least – that these sites look deliberately similar, to make a point about code re-use in HMG.)

Maybe I’m being too precious about this. On low-budget, low-ambition projects, an off-the-shelf theme will probably be more, much more than adequate. You can have a website with top-notch functionality up and running in, let’s say, an hour. Client is happy, designer is off to the pub.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to how you see your business. Companies make money by selling lots of something cheap, or a few of something expensive. You can churn out lots of identikit sites for lots of people: that’s a perfectly valid business model, albeit pretty intensive on the sales side. Alternatively, you can try to make each one special. Puffbox opted for the latter. And so far, we’re doing OK out of it.
23 Apr 2009

company, e-government

commentariat, maps, ordnancesurvey, wordpress

Ordnance Survey's new approach

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with Ordnance Survey to produce a WordPress version of their new business strategy, published today. As you’ll immediately spot, it’s another piece of work based on Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme, including some of the tweaks I did for BERR’s Low Carbon Strategy.

As I write this, I’ve literally just pressed the ‘go’ button, so I haven’t even read the document yet myself, and can’t offer any opinion on it (yet). But I didn’t hide my disappointment at the unveiling of the OpenSpace project a year ago, and I’m told things have moved much further forward on that front at least. It hasn’t been enough to satisfy the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign, though.

I know this is a subject of considerable interest to the e-government / activist community, which probably covers most of you reading this. We’ve created a web-friendly platform for you to read what OS are proposing, and tell them what you think about it. What are you waiting for?
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.)