company – Page 7

8 Apr 2009

company, politics

Puffbox's new site for digital politics 'guru'

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

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

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

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

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

company, e-government

careandsupport, ournhs, wordpress, yui

Our new site for Social Care green paper

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

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

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

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

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

company, e-government, technology

directgov, firefox, microsoft

Search tools for Directgov: Puffbox vs Microsoft

Directgov has announced a ‘partnership’ with Microsoft, promising to make it ‘easier than ever to find government information and services online’. In practice, this means they’re using the new ‘accelerator’ feature in Internet Explorer v8: you can select some text on any web page, then right-click to access a ‘search Directgov’ link which fires that word directly into the Directgov search engine as a search query. I don’t think it’ll be life-changing for anyone, and my suspicion is that there’s more in it for Microsoft than Directgov – but hey, it’s not a bad thing.

But how many people are using IE8? What about the much greater number of people using, say, IE7… or Firefox? Puffbox to the rescue! I’ve thrown together a quick search plugin for Directgov, which will allow you to search Directgov directly from the browser interface. ~~You will have to do the copying and pasting manually though, so apologies for the lack of acceleration.~~

And if you’re using Firefox, and you happen to have Directgov selected as your browser-bar search engine at the time – behold! you’ll have the same ‘search Directgov’ option in your right-click menu! (Thx to Stuart in the comments.)

Visit this page on the MozDev website to find Puffbox’s brand new Directgov search plugin. Click on the word Directgov, and it’ll ask you if you want to install – say yes. If you then consult the list of search engines available from your browser’s built-in search box, you should now see a Directgov option. Enter a word, and it’ll take you straight to a search query for that word.

Puffbox principal consultant Simon Dickson said: ‘Directgov is taking advantage of long-established capabilities within Internet Explorer 7, and better alternatives such as Firefox, to make it easier for members of the public to find information on the Directgov website – whether they realise it or not. Directgov is among the forward-thinking organisations using modern technologies to benefit their target audience, and we are delighted to be helping them.’

I’ll link to the Directgov newsroom article as soon as it’s been posted.
24 Mar 2009

company, e-government

governanceofbritain, ournhs, wordpress

Flying the nest

As I’ve written before, one of the (many) selling points of WordPress is the lack of lock-in. When the time comes for a client to take greater control of a project, or if they simply feel it’s time for a change, they aren’t stuck with all their content locked in a proprietary CMS. They’re free to export their content, and take it elsewhere – to a new WordPress expert, to a new theme, to a whole new existence.

And in a further sign of the maturity of WordPress in the marketplace, I’ll be waving goodbye to a couple of my earliest WordPress projects; I’ll also be bringing in a couple of new ones from other people.

Governance of Britain has been tweaked by someone many of you will know – but since he/she hasn’t mentioned the work publicly yet, I won’t name names. It’s been rebranded as People, Power and Politics, and features a much more web-friendly design, and the sort of ‘web 2.0’ integration that simply wasn’t practical, or even possible when the site was first built 18 months ago. I really like what’s been done with it, in a remarkably short space of time – and I wish it well. For various reasons – some practical, some political – the site didn’t really work out as we hoped. I’m hoping the new manager, located closer to the heart of things, can take it further than I could.

There are also moves to breathe new life into the Our NHS, Our Future website, mothballed since the publication of last summer’s big NHS review; again, it’ll be an internal team taking greater ownership of things. It looks like the site will be more ambitious in some ways, less so in others, and with a different, more internal-NHS focus than last time. I’ve been helping the new team with the various technicalities and practicalities; launch is a little way away, but the early signs are encouraging.

Part of me is naturally sad to see them go; but since the Puffbox cause has been to encourage government to make more use of tools like WordPress, I have to put it down as a Mission Accomplished: my work there is done. And to be perfectly honest, it’s quite a relief to free up some space – albeit temporarily! – in my diary. I’ve had more offers of work lately than I could ever fulfil; and I’ve got three major projects on the go just now, which take us well beyond the straightforward ‘WordPress as CMS’ notion. I can’t wait to tell you about them.
9 Mar 2009

company, e-government

berr, commentariat, dfid, puffbox, stephgray, wordpress

A couple of Commentariat launches

A key element of the (re)statement of UK government open source policy the other week was the need to ’embed an open source culture of sharing, re–use and collaborative development’. That may have seemed like a waste of ink/bandwidth to those outside government; but I can assure you, I’ve sat in too many wheel reinvention seminars in my life already.

So Puffbox is glad to do its bit to get the wheels turning, by building and launching a couple of commentable documents using Steph Gray HM Government’s Commentariat WordPress theme, as seen on the (draft) Power Of Information Taskforce report. One is for DFID, on the elimination of world poverty; the other for Neil Williams at BERR, on the Low Carbon Economy. Wow, weighty subjects or what? – WordPress saving the world?!

Both are instantly recognisable as variations on Steph’s basic theme, give or take a bit of branding. This was a deliberate choice: I felt it was important for the sites’ origins to be immediately evident, as they needed to send a clear message about re-use, and the benefits in terms of speed and cost.

The DFID site was just another WordPress installation in an existing environment – the same one we’re using for DFID Bloggers, as it happens; the total cost to them will be one day of my time, covering WP setup and tweaks to the theme. And when you look at the functionality they’re getting for just a few hundred quid, it’s a pretty good deal.

The BERR project was slightly trickier. It was a new WPMU environment, always a little trickier to set up; and because the document wasn’t as long as other Commentariat instances have been, I had to re-engineer the theme to work off pages rather than categorised posts. I finished my bit in the final hours before dashing off on a week’s holiday; seeing the finished product on my return, I’m really impressed by how well it’s come together. Massive credit to Neil and the BERR team; the use of pictures really makes a dramatic difference.
23 Feb 2009

company, e-government

delicious, downingstreet, notwordpress, puffbox, realhelpnow

Real Help Now: a national picture

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with the Downing Street team to put together Real Help Now – a fairly modest website, for now anyway, to introduce and demonstrate the practical help available to families and businesses during the recession.

Fundamentally, in this initial build, it’s a news aggregation site – pulling together material not just from national sources, but regional and local too. The aim is to complement the citizen- and business-facing stuff, at Directgov and BusinessLink respectively, by showing what’s actually happening on the ground, well away from Whitehall and the City.

What CMS are we using? Brace yourself – for once, it’s not WordPress. Not yet.

The news content is being managed through a Delicious account. When we spot a new item of interest, we tag it with the relevant region; then, when you click a region on the map, we call the relevant RSS feed in (via Google’s excellent feed API). The feeds give us everything we need; the Delicious tagging tools are excellent; and, of course, it also means Delicious users can interact directly with the account, if they so desire. The ‘latest video’ box works off RSS feeds too: we’re aggregating YouTube feeds from several government accounts, plus relevant material from Downing Street’s Number10TV (which uses Brightcove).

I could bang on about the intricacy of the HTML layering, or the gorgeous JQuery fades on the video box; but you may as well have a look for yourselves. My only disappointment comes from the animation effects I had to ditch late on, when I couldn’t make them work satisfactorily in IE6. (The majority getting a lesser service due to the minority’s refusal to make a free upgrade? – discuss.)

We aren’t making any great claims for this site: it is what it is, a pretty front end, courtesy of regular collaborator Jonathan Harris, pointing to other people’s material, plus a (first person) message from the Prime Minister. But if it can establish itself, there’s naturally plenty of scope to extend and expand into something more communicative and interactive.
30 Jan 2009

company

puffbox

Meet the new Puffbox.com

If you’re reading this on the website rather than the RSS feed, you’ll already have noticed things look a bit different. It’s a new year, Barcamp is around the corner, and it’s high time for a design refresh of the company website. Of course, it’s still a custom WordPress theme; and everything’s more or less in the same place. And yes, it’s still green, although not quite as green.

So what has changed? Not as much as I initially intended; there were some wild ideas in the initial sketches, let me tell you! But for all sorts of reasons, many of those fell by the wayside – not least, it has to be said, because many of my government contacts are stuck using IE6. In the end, it became a reinforcement of the principles I liked best from the previous design, most notably the very vertical approach.

You’ll notice a lot more imagery on the site. I’m conducting an experiment using the new WordPress media library function, to pull out the thumbnails it generates automatically when you upload a picture. There’s amazing potential in this, and I wanted to give it a try; but there may be issues with older content, posted in previous WordPress versions. I’m also using gravatar images to personalise the comments function a bit; if you haven’t already associated a picture with your email address, hop over to Gravatar.

It’s also been a chance to update my own site with the technologies I’m regularly using on other people’s: things like JQuery, and the Yahoo! UI Library’s CSS templates. I nearly built the whole thing without HTML tables, until a last-minute crisis courtesy of (guess) IE6. And for once, it looks great – and probably, best of all – in Safari.

I’d love to know what you think.
30 Jan 2009

company, politics

libdems

All the LibDem news you can consume

I’ve often written in glowing terms about the Liberal Democrats’ approach to the web; for a good few years now, they’ve been doing some remarkably innovative stuff which, for whatever reason, was always overlooked. So it was a real pleasure recently to meet the party’s wonderfully-titled Head of Innovations, Mark Pack; and it led to a little Puffbox project to pull together some of their disparate material.

The Lib Dems run a number of blogs on very specific policy areas: defence, home affairs, the Al Yamamah arms deal. There’s the main party website, of course. And Nick Clegg’s personal site. Plus sites for the party’s representation in the Lords and the European Parliament. And the stuff they do on YouTube. And Delicious. And Twitter. That’s a lot of different RSS feeds to subscribe to; and no one place to look for an overview of what’s happening today.

So I’ve built them a new WordPress theme to sit at the top level of their blogs’ server, aggregating all this stuff into a single homepage, with a single RSS feed, and a single ‘blogroll’. Well, I say ‘theme’: it really only amounts to managing the blogroll, and a single paragraph of text. The rest is just stand-alone PHP.

It’s deliberately designed to match the main Lib Dems site, with a few tweaks to make it work better cross-platform. But I’ve also done an ‘iPhone version’, using exactly the same HTML, but calling a different set of CSS styles depending on the ‘user agent string’. We abandon the multi-column layout of the ‘normal’ version, to show it in a single column: it just works so much better with the smooth scrolling of the iPhone interface.

It’s our first piece of explicitly ‘party political’ work; and given our Whitehall focus, I had to think hard about (a) taking it on, and (b) talking about it here. But I concluded that it simply shouldn’t be an issue: being brutal, we’re a business, it’s legitimate work, there’s a recession on, and my mortgage won’t pay itself.

And since this isn’t a blog about politics per se, that’s where I’ll leave it.
30 Jan 2009

company, e-government

blogs, dfid, simonwheatley

DFID's new group blog function

We rolled out a fairly modest enhancement to the DFID Bloggers website this week: probably unnoticed by most users, but one I’m quite proud of. At its heart, the DFID site is a group blog; but we do a few things to present it as a network of individual blogs by individual bloggers. Then the question came – ‘could we do a group blog?’

What we’ve done is effectively hijack WordPress’s category functionality, turning it into a grouping function. We’ve created categories corresponding to the various ‘group blogs’ we want to run; and with the help of another custom plugin, we’ve added the ability to give each category its own ‘user image’, same as we’ve done with individuals. The WordPress category archive template then becomes, effectively, a ‘group homepage’ template.

Then, with another plugin, we’ve added a function to give each individual user a ‘default category’. So when they go to write a post, the appropriate category is already ticked – or to put it another way, it’s already identified as being for the appropriate ‘group’. But as with any WordPress categorisation, you have the option to tick other categories, adding the post to multiple group blogs; or you can untick your default category, if you want to blog in an individual capacity for a change.

Finally, we’ve changed the homepage code to handle both individual and group blogs. It took a while to get the logic right – but now, you should only ever see one entry per group blog, same as you only see one entry per individual blogger; and it all gets sorted together into reverse chronological order.

The result is a remarkably flexible blogging platform, with the ability to do solo blogs, group blogs, or any combination thereof. And as with the previous DFID work, we’re releasing the plugins to the world: the Default Categories plugin should prove particularly useful for people running group blogs.

Once again, it’s been a pleasure to work with Simon Wheatley: the man who makes my WordPress dreams come true. And the DFID guys have been great again too, giving us a general steer and letting us work out the best way to do it. I love this project.
19 Dec 2008

company, e-government

blogging, dfid, puffbox, redesign

DFID redesigned

This week saw the next phase in the incremental redesign of the Department For International Development‘s website. It’s a much airier, brighter look than before, and with a YouTube video front and centre, plus all those drop shadows, rounded corners and various JQuery effects, it feels bang up to date. There’s a new ‘top layer’ of public-friendly information, Fighting Poverty, which is very easy on the eye, without getting in the way of the more mundane operational stuff. They’ve struck an excellent balance, I think.

The changes to the parent site meant we had to revisit certain elements of the DFID Bloggers site, built and launched by Puffbox just a couple of months back; partly for visual consistency, but also because we’re feeding off the same CSS stylesheet. Everything’s more or less where it was before, but the colours have been brightened up a bit, and taking a lead from the parent site, we’re now optimised for 1024px-wide screens. We’ve also tweaked a few other things, but I doubt you’ll notice them.

(The parent site has repaid the compliment by giving front-page space to the Bloggers site – but before anyone mentions it: no, it isn’t automatically taking the latest item via RSS, they’re choosing which items they want to promote.)

On the Bloggers site at least, the switch on the night was remarkably pain-free: just a simple matter of changing from one WordPress theme to another, literally a single click and it’s done. I’ve always seen this as one of WordPress’s hidden strengths – and I’ve talked to one or two clients about making deliberate use of it. You can imagine a scenario where there are several versions of the same basic design, all stored as separate WP themes, for different situations and circumstances – as a crude example, a black-tinged ‘national mourning’ version. Deploying it would take seconds. Hey, can your big ugly CMS do that, I wonder?

The DFID team are taking an incremental approach to their web development – and good on them for it. There are further ‘structural changes and technical improvements’ planned for 2009, plus – all being well – some cool new functionality in the Bloggers site. Stay tuned.