Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    Mirror and Telegraph redesigns

    The new Mirror website is a dramatic improvement. But then again, all previous Mirror websites have been terrible – particularly the last one, launched just 18 months ago.

    As Martin Stabe notes, the site’s homepage takes an unfamiliar building-blocks approach… which, in this case, I really find myself warming to. It suits the kind of picture-heavy, celebrity-led material within. Dig a little deeper, and frankly it’s fairly average – but for the Mirror, as I say, that’s a big step forward.

    Meanwhile, I can’t quite make my mind up about the Telegraph’s new design, being rolled out gradually this week, section by section. It’s very nice – structurally and visually; and fixes some of the things I didn’t like before. But it feels very – can’t think of a better word – conservative. There’s no hint of a ‘2.0’ feel to it whatsoever: no rounded corners, no colour gradients, no Javascript effects, no glossy icons. No homepage space for the ‘community’ or multimedia stuff. There are ‘sharing’ links, and links to related blog content, but it’s all downplayed.

    You could argue that this is all good. It’s in keeping with the more conservative brand demographic. It’s classic rather than fashionable. But it’s, well, a bit retro. And with everyone rushing to be more ‘2.0’ than their rivals, that feels just a bit odd.

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    ID card debate hijacked

    I wonder if the Home Office is regretting its MyLifeMyID website yet? The Drupal-based website, aimed at 16-25 year olds (for some reason?), isn’t having trouble attracting traffic… but unfortunately, a large chunk of its traffic is using the site to actually organise an anti-ID Card campaign.

    This topic was always going to attract ‘undesirable’ use; and I’d personally have advised against an open forum model. But having made the decision to go ahead with it, I don’t think the requirement to fill in a complex registration form (age, gender, location, ethnicity) before commenting was smart.

    I still believe there’s a case to be made for an ID system of some kind, based on the potential benefits to public services, if the technical hurdles can be overcome – or at least mitigated. We need ministers (or officials?) to accept there’s a massive engagement task here, probably the biggest currently on the government agenda; and to embark on a slow, sustained process to demonstrate that all the issues are being taken seriously, and that individual citizens will see real, direct, personal benefits as a result of it. And to accept that the public’s answer may still be ‘no’.

    I’m not sure this site has done a lot to advance the cause.

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    Guido-Tom Watson consensus on gov jobs?

    One senses there’s not a lot of love between Guido Fawkes and Tom Watson. So it’s all the more remarkable that, within a few days, they’ve effectively reached an identical conclusion on the need for a better approach to public sector job advertising.

    A week ago, Tom wrote a blog post noting the lack of a consistent approach on publishing job vacancies. I was one of several people to respond by noting that (in theory at least) there is actually a central website for all job vacancies already. Mind you, if only us insiders know, then it may as well not exist. Questions like this don’t get asked without a reason, so hopefully it’s the start of something significant.

    Now this morning, Guido Fawkes has published details of his plan to bankrupt the Guardian, part of which is this:

    One of the first thing the Tories should do in power is set up www.jobs.gov.uk. All available public sector positions would be listed there free of charge, this would save hundreds of millions in advertising costs for the taxpayer and deprive the Guardian of a critical revenue stream.

    Aw, isn’t it sweet? Next thing you know, they’ll be playing football between the trenches. 🙂

    The central website has been around since 2003 (at least), and in 2004 I was talking to them about the idea of ‘saved searches’ as RSS feeds. Departments could enter their results into the central database, then power a ‘current vacancies’ list on their own corporate website using the RSS feed. At the time, I only knew of one website offering such a service (Wired): it would have been cutting-edge. Now it’s a feature of many websites – TheyWorkForYou, BBC – and the RSS-processing part is almost embarrassingly easy. That’s before we get on to things like plotting vacancies on Google Maps…

    Perhaps it’s an idea whose time has finally come. With the existing site basically unchanged in 5 years, it’s easy to justify a refresh. There are plenty of recruitment sites out there, from which to draw inspiration. There will be benefits in terms of customer service, staff efficiency, and defining best practice. We need concrete examples to show Whitehall that yes, it can be done.

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    Puffbox sponsors WordCamp UK

    I’m proud to announce that Puffbox is sponsoring the inaugural WordCamp UK, bringing about 100 devotees of WordPress to Birmingham for a weekend of code and conversation.

    The event takes place on 19-20 July, at the (apparently very classy) Studio conference centre in the centre of Britain’s nominally second city. The programme covers everything from a beginner’s guide to a hardcore code surgery. We’ll also be joined by Sam from Automattic Inc, the company behind WordPress.

    I’m down to lead a session called ‘WordPress is not a blog’, where I’ll talk about my work, and how I’ve managed to take WordPress right to the heart of government. It’ll be one of the less technical sessions of the weekend; I’ll be looking at how the bloggers’ approach can translate to the stuffiest corporate environments, and how I think we’re entering a post-blogging world. None of which will come as the slightest surprise to regular readers.

    It’s maybe unusual for a one-man company to sponsor a fairly large conference like this. But virtually everything Puffbox does at the moment is WordPress-based. It’s the content management platform I always dreamed of… and it’s free of charge. It’s time I gave something back.

    Besides, it’s in Puffbox’s interests for this gathering to take place. It’ll be an enjoyable weekend of unashamed geekery. I’m hoping to meet some interesting people, learn some interesting things, and help create a support infrastructure for WordPress in the UK. A T-shirt with a big W on the front would be a bonus.

    I’m also really excited at being back in central Birmingham for the first time since I graduated 14 years ago. Gulp.

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    Power Taskforce's ideas on crime maps

    The Home Office is confirming that it’ll press ahead with online crime mapping, as recommended by today’s Casey Report on Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime.

    Even better, the Power Of Information taskforce – specifically Will Perrin and Tom Loosemore, in apparent association with designers Schulze and Webb – have posted a few concepts showing not only the mapping of crime data, aggregated to postcode sector; not only an overlaid layer of data showing public facilities such as schools, pubs and cash machines; but also the ability to actually do something as a follow-on. I’m especially intrigued by the RSS icon: blogging bobbies, perhaps?

    Judging by the mockups anyway, we’re looking at some serious interaction potential: polling on local priorities, emailing the local policing team or your local elected representatives. (Never mind the possibility of interacting with the data.)

    It’s not the first time some/most of this has been proposed: whilst working at National Statistics, I was involved in the concept work which ultimately led to the disappointing Neighbourhood Statistics. It’s not as if we didn’t have some of these same ideas… but mashing-up has come a long way since then, thanks particularly to Google Maps. I note the ‘presumption’ that Google’s technology would underpin these maps… another nail in Ordnance Survey’s coffin?

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    Does anyone ever 'share this'?

    On a couple of design jobs lately, clients have been very eager to have ‘sharing’ buttons on their pages. You know the sort of thing… one-click functions to submit a page to the reader’s Delicious, digg or Facebook friends. I get the feeling it’s purely because they’ve seen it on other sites, and think they should have it too.

    Except, in my experience, they’re very rarely used… and I mean rarely. Let’s look at one site: the BBC blogs, rated the number one ‘British blog’ (singular?) by Hitwise. Roughly half the BBC’s blogs have links to share content on Digg.com – rated the UK’s #11 online news source, also by Hitwise – as well as Delicious, Newsvine, NowPublic and Reddit (but not StumbleUpon?). These were first introduced nearly a year ago, surely plenty of time for people to have become aware of them. Even better, many of the Beeb’s blogs are relatively geeky in content, so should appeal to the more tech-literate Digger.

    So let’s visit Digg, and search for all the instances of people ‘digging’ a page on www.bbc.co.uk/blogs. The results:

    • a total of 16 articles were shared in the last 28 days
    • and half of them were only ‘dugg’ by one single person.
    • Half of the 60-odd digs in the last month were to a single posting, on the dot.life technology blog – which doesn’t even have sharing buttons on it.

    Don't worry, it's just a lame jokeThat said, it isn’t exactly difficult (in most cases) to add these buttons: at code level, it’s usually just a case of tacking the ‘permalink’ on the end of a base URL. And I guess it makes the point that you’re ‘down with this sort of thing’.

    But if you think it’s going to drive huge amounts of traffic your way, think again. And if it’s any kind of effort to get your IT people to add them in… pick a different battle, I’d say.

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    Embed RSS feeds via Google

    RSS is my answer to everything. So simple, so straightforward, so flexible. Yet, as I’ve mentioned here before, I’m amazed how few government web sites – especially new ones – offer feeds. The number using RSS feeds to pull content in, of course, is even smaller. A few months back, I asked readers how many had websites which could import content via RSS. The results were depressingly predictable (or should that be predictably depressing?).

    If it’s something you’d like to add to your site, Google might well have a solution. They’ve made available a ‘feed API’, based on simple Javascript, to pull headlines together from any RSS feeds (yes, plural) you specify, and turn them into HTML for inclusion in your pages. You can have a conventional one-line ticker, or a vertical presentation: in an aggregated list, or divided by source. Adding a live view of the latest headlines from any given (RSS-enabled) site just became as easy as copy-and-paste… assuming your CMS is OK about you entering Javascript.

    Of course Google’s far from the first to do this… but I’ve never seen a similar service with the same big-name, long-term backing. The code looks relatively simple to hack if you need to, and you should be able to dress it up in the host site’s font/colours using basic CSS. Plus, the Google ‘widgets’ are really neat, with hover effects and animations built in. It’s far from ‘industrial strength’, but it might well be enough for smaller projects.

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    CoverItLive adds branding options

    Hosted live-blogging service CoverItLive, by far the best way to liveblog, always came with a catch. You could set it up, and drop it into your website, in minutes… but it was very obviously a rather crude embedding of ‘someone else’s service’. Their logo, their font, not yours. But not any more.

    Effective today, there’s an option on the CoverItLive admin interface for ‘My Viewer Window’, allowing you to create your own presentation style by uploading your own logos, resizing the window to fit your design, and selecting one of the web’s ‘usual suspects’ fonts. The images must be a specific pixel size, which isn’t actually a bad thing in my book… and must be GIF, JPG, PNG or (intriguingly!) Flash. There’s still a small ‘powered by CoverItLive’ message in the corner, but hey – give them a break!

    The ‘main image’ is effectively a ‘splash screen’, for when the liveblogging isn’t ‘on’ – so you probably don’t need to worry too much about it, frankly. (Maybe do a cute ‘please wait’ message or something?) The ‘secondary image’ appears at the bottom of the iframe, and sits on top of a grey strip with a background image applied. To make it look most natural, I’d suggest you use a transparent 24-bit PNG: that should sit beautifully and seamlessly on top.

    I’m talking to a couple of clients who are excited by the possibilities of live-blogging. I wholeheartedly recommended CoverItLive as the solution, but with a (single) caveat about the lack of visual integration with the client site. That problem has gone away overnight. The CoverItLive guys are doing everything you could ask of them, and they entirely deserve their top spot in this emerging field.

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    BBC's new /topics pages

    See, this is what you can do when you’ve got lots of information, all properly tagged and structured. The BBC’s new /topics pages are entirely automated, and pull together content from across their online offerings – iPlayer, the News site, weather, /programmes – into a nicely presented ‘everything we know about X’ page. A modest 66 topics to start with, by my calculation, but the promise of many more. Try these examples: NHS, Gordon Brown, Liechtenstein. (And check out the pretty addressing, too.)

    Over on the BBC Internet Blog, Matthew McDonnell explains how it uses ‘a variety of search techniques to create feeds of the latest BBC content’. I’m guessing a lot of it is down to a subject taxonomy, or free-text search for certain keywords. However it works, its beauty is encapsulated by this section:

    Because the overhead involved in maintaining these pages is so low, we can cover many more subjects than we could using traditionally edited pages which had to be manually updated by a human being. As the feeds used in /topics are automatic, we can be confident that all the pages are bang up-to-date.

    In many respects, this is the ‘holy grail’ of every taxonomy project. Well done to the BBC for actually making it happen; although it’s likely to encourage others to attempt to follow suit. And most will fail. (Yes they will.) And for the future?

    We want to include high quality content from outside the BBC to enhance our pages. We’ll be working on providing feeds of news and blogs from sources other than the BBC. Yes, feeds [for you to build into your own website] will be available soon.

    It’s genuinely brilliant: can we call it a hybrid of Wikipedia and Wikinews, with the added benefit of trusted editorial oversight? Just please, don’t try it at home.

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    BBC's lessons for management blogs

    The BBC’s Jem Stone adds an interesting perspective on the success (so far) of the BBC’s management / editorial blogs, in a comment on ex-BBC man Alfred Hermida‘s blog. There are very valuable lessons here for many similar ‘transparency through blogging’ initiatives, not least in government and politics:

    We’ve found that [engagement with readers’ feedback] is possible (and I’m talking about the BBC mgt internet blog here but I’d say it applies to other similar propositions) but only when we’ve had two factors in place:

    a) Strong ownership (buy in from senior management even when criticism from users is a “s**tstorm” as Ashley Highfield dubbed the initial BBC iPlayer/Mac period the other day) and

    b) Investment in community facilitation, monitoring and hosting. Monitoring feedback and having the antennae to alert issues to teams (and thus the knowledge of the tools that makes this now a lot easier) is often overlooked. Doing this well can’t be done by magic.

    Hope you don’t mind, Jem – I’ve fixed the spelling. 🙂

    Incidentally… this isn’t the first time recently where the most valuable insight has been in the comments, and not in the originating blog post. If you’re deciding whether or not to open your pages up to readers’ comments, don’t just think of the management overhead. Think what you might be missing out on.