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

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  • 6 Sep 2011
    e-government, technology
    accessibility, broaderbenefits, gds, govuk, opensource

    How we could all benefit from Betagov's accessibility work

    Accessibility is the subject of the latest post on the Government Digital Service blog: having had their fingers burned in the ‘alphagov’ phase of work, by consciously ignoring the subject, it’s clear they want to be seen to make it a priority into the beta phase.

    Léonie Watson writes:

    Tom Loosemore has said: “… we want to make the most easy to use, accessible government website there has ever been”. Those of you who know something about web development on this scale will understand what a challenge that is. Those of you who know me will also recognise it’s a goal I thoroughly believe in. So, what are we doing to achieve that goal? Simply put, we’re planning accessibility in from the outset and documenting the accessibility steps we take throughout the website’s lifetime.

    I’ve posted a comment on her article, which I’ll reproduce here for the record. You’ll instantly note a common theme with my recent inflammatory post about departmental publishing.

    As you’ve noted, accessibility is very hard to get right: you’re conceding that you might not even score a ‘perfect 10’, even though you’re ‘planning [it] in from the outset’. And as [previous commenter] Keith says, for small organisations, it’s prohibitively expensive to even buy the rulebook, before you even begin to implement the rules.

    If government is hiring experts, consulting widely with users, and (hopefully) delivering exemplary results, it seems like a tragic waste for the benefits to be locked into a single website.

    Wouldn’t it be fantastic if one of the outputs from your work were to be a reusable, customisable front-end theme for an open-source, widely-used publishing platform, like WordPress or Drupal? You could enforce certain ‘must have’ accessibility practices in the page templates, whilst still giving people plenty of scope to make it look and feel like their own site – via a parent/child theme arrangement, or a ‘theme options’ screen.

    You could then release that theme publicly – giving web developers everywhere a robust base on which to build their sites. Imagine all those common accessibility headaches being solved, before the first line of custom code is written.

    (I’m not suggesting this would solve all problems instantly, of course. And there’s still plenty of scope to cause all sorts of new problems in, say, a child theme’s CSS. But you’d certainly be giving people one heck of a head start.)

    The fact is, very few organisations have any real motivation to get accessibility right. But Government has a moral obligation to do so. And you’re spending our taxes to do it… so I’d argue we all have a right to enjoy the fruits of that labour. Central and local government, public and private sector.

    Issuing a list of rules seems a very old-fashioned way to encourage / enforce good practice. You have an opportunity here, to do something much smarter than that.

     

  • 25 Aug 2011
    e-government, technology
    broaderbenefits, gds, govuk, neilwilliams, opensource

    Bespoke builds and broader benefits

    In which Simon makes the case for the ‘government machine’ (in the diagram above), for government departments to publish fairly basic written information about their work, to be built on something which already exists, instead of being built ‘from the ground up’. If you haven’t already, do read Neil’s piece… then Stephen Hale’s piece about the Department of Health’s new approach… then read on. And do please note the line about ‘Seriously, this isn’t about WordPress.’

    It won’t entirely surprise you to learn that, when Neil Williams’s blog post about government web publishing in the world of a Single Domain popped up in my feeds, the first thing I did was press control-F, and search for ‘wordpress’. And hooray, multiple mentions! Well, yes, but.

    Some background, for those who need it: Neil is head of digital comms at BIS, currently ‘on loan’ to the Government Digital Service team, to lead the work exploring how government departments fit into the grand Lane Fox / Loosemore / Alphagov vision. A ‘hidden gem‘, Tom Loosemore calls him – which seems a bit harsh, as Neil has been quite the trailblazer in his work at BIS, not least with his own web consolidation project. It’s hard to think of anyone better placed to take up this role.

    With that track record, it’s happily predictable to see Neil reserving a specific place for WordPress (and the like). More generally, the vision – as illustrated in the diagram reproduced above – is sound, with the right things in the right places. There’s so much to welcome in it. But there’s one line, describing an ‘irreducible core‘, which stopped me in my tracks:

    a bespoke box of tricks we’ll be building from the ground up to meet the publishing needs most government organisations have in common, and the information needs ‘specialist’ audiences most commonly have of government.

    Here’s my question for the GDS team: why bespoke? why ‘from the ground up’?

    It’s a decision which requires justification. ‘Bespoke’ invariably costs more and takes longer. It will increase the risks, and reduce the potential rewards. It would also seem to be directly in breach of the commitment Francis Maude made in June 2010, to build departmental websites ‘wherever possible using open source software’. Were all the various open source publishing platforms given due consideration? Was it found to be literally impossible to use any of them, even as a basis for development?

    Let’s assume WordPress and Drupal, the two most obvious open source candidates, were properly considered, as required by the Minister. Let’s assume contributions were sought from people familiar with the products in question, and just as importantly, the well-established communities around them. Both are perfectly capable of delivering the multi-view, multi-post type, common taxonomy-based output described in the ‘multistorey’ diagram. Both are widely used and widely understood. So why might they have been rejected?

    Did the team spot security or performance issues? If so, wouldn’t the more responsible, more open-source-minded approach be to fix those issues? Then we’d all see direct benefits – on our own personal or company websites – from the expert insight of those hired by our government. If things are wrong with such widely-used technologies, whether inside or outside government, it’s already government’s problem.

    Or were there particular functions which weren’t available ‘out of the box’? If so, is it conceivable that someone else might have needed the same functions? Local government, perhaps – for which the GDS team has ‘no plans or remit‘. We’re seeing plenty of take-up of WordPress and Drupal in local government land too. They have very similar needs and obligations as regards news and policy publication, consultations, documents, data, petitions, biographies of elected representatives, cross-cutting themes, and so on. Why not make it easy, and cheap, for them to share in the fruits of your labours?

    But I think it goes wider than different tiers of government. Government is under a moral obligation to think about how its spending of our taxes could benefit not just itself, but all of us too.

    Even if this project’s bespoke code is eventually open-sourced, the level of knowledge required to unpick the useful bits will be well beyond most potential users. Given that it’ll probably be in Ruby or Python, whose combined market share is below 1%, it won’t be much use ‘out of the box’ to most websites. A plugin uploaded to the WordPress repository, or a module added to Drupal’s library, would be instantly available to millions, and infinitely easier to find, install and maintain. (Well, certainly in the former case anyway.)

    I can’t help thinking of the example of the BBC’s custom Glow javascript library, which does simplified DOM manipulation (a bit like jQuery), event handling (a bit like jQuery), animations (a bit like jQuery), etc, proudly open-sourced two years ago. It appears to have attracted a grand total of 3 non-BBC contributors. Its second version, incompatible with the first, remains stuck at the beta-1 release of June 2010. Its Twitter account died about the same time; and its mailing list isn’t exactly high-traffic. I’m not convinced it ever ‘unlock[ed] extraordinary value out there in the network‘. Proof, surely, that open-sourcing your own stuff isn’t the same as pitching in with everyone else.

    Seriously, this isn’t about WordPress – although that’s unquestionably where the Whitehall web teams’ desire path leads. It’s not really even about open source software. It’s about government’s obligation to the citizens and businesses which fund it. It’s about engaging with existing communities, instead of trying to create your own. Acknowledging people’s right to access and make use of the data – erm, sorry, the code – whose creation they funded. Any of that sound familiar?

    There’s so much right about the picture Neil paints. And maybe I’m reading too much into a single line. But the idea of building yet another bespoke CMS to meet Whitehall’s supposedly-unique requirements seems to be three to five years out of date. And it didn’t work too well, three to five years ago. Or three to five years before that. Or…

  • 22 Aug 2011
    technology
    wordpress

    WordPress in proper English

    If you’ve ever felt just a little, well, awkward with WordPress’s use of American (so-called) English – color, ‘uncategorized’ and so on – I’ve got frightfully good news for you.

    A brief exchange of tweets this morning between myself, Dave Coveney and Automattic’s Peter Westwood led to the creation of a proper localisation project, to ‘translate’ WordPress into the Queen’s English.

    Like nearly all WordPress translations, it’s being run through the online GlotPress application – which presents you with each phrase used in WordPress core, one by one, and invites you to translate it. In this case, of course, a lot of it won’t need translating: which means, as Peter so rightly points out, we’ll never hit the magic ‘100% translated’ mark.

    Will this improve anyone’s experience of WordPress, on this side of the Atlantic? I doubt it. But it’s a bit of fun, and it might actually help with bug-hunting or UI refinement in GlotPress, or WordPress itself, to have two near-identical languages for easy comparison.

    It also gives me (and you?) a chance to call myself a contributor to WordPress, not just a mere user. The GlotPress system is fairly intuitive; all you’ll need to get started is a wordpress.org forum account.

    Of course, this United Kingdom has numerous languages with official recognition (of some kind), not just English: Welsh, Gaelic (both Scottish and Irish), Scots and indeed Ulster-Scots. Putting my government hat back on, I’d love to see a situation where the relevant language promotion bodies organised, funded, or even just contributed to translation efforts on WordPress, or other online technologies of similarly wide take-up.

  • 8 Aug 2011
    e-government, technology
    health, stephenhale, stephgray, wordpress

    Dept of Health switches to WordPress

    Congratulations to Stephen Hale and the team at DH for finally making the leap, and moving their corporate web presence over to WordPress.

    Stephen hinted at such a move back in February, when he blogged about their successful use of WP for a number of subsites: ‘having dipped a toe in,’ he wrote, ‘it’s tempting to go a bit further than we originally planned.’ Clearly though, Stephen’s plans have moved on quite a bit since the start of the year: in a blog post last week, he described this as ‘phase 2 of 4’ (!).

    As with our work for Defra, they’ve opted not to redesign the site: it still looks (broadly) the same as it did, although not identical, and the trained eye will spot a more WordPress-friendly approach to sidebars and things. Nor have they migrated most of the old content: it will remain accessible until it’s out of date, at which point it’ll be moved to an (unspecified) archive. I don’t think anyone would call that a perfect solution, but these are cash-strapped times, and it’s almost certainly good enough.

    The project – driven by Steph Gray, including some input from Mike Little – is based on HealthPress, the same TwentyTen-based child theme Steph developed for those aforementioned subsites. Back in February, I wrote that the code ‘isn’t pushing the technology’s boundaries too hard’ – and really, that’s still the case. But I stress, I don’t write that as a criticism. It’s to Steph’s great credit, and that of WordPress itself of course, that he’s made the site work with just a vanilla WP instance. Amazing what you can do with posts & pages, tags & categories, a bunch of widgets, and a few ‘usual suspect’ plugins.

    Stephen very kindly referenced the Word Up Whitehall event from last October as having provided ‘a moment of epiphany’: if there’s a direct line to be drawn from there to here, then I’m absolutely delighted my little get-together served its purpose. Maybe it’s time for a follow-up.

    That’s now four Whitehall departments running their primary websites on WordPress: Transport, Health, Defra and the Wales Office; plus Downing Street, of course, and several – Cabinet Office, BIS, DFID, DECC – using it for secondary elements of their corporate websites.

    So does that make it the most used ‘CMS’ for Whitehall departments’ primary sites? I rather think it might. 😀

  • 29 Jul 2011
    e-government, technology
    blogging, cabinetoffice, petitions, wordpress

    The return of e-petitions; a new home for the Govt Digital Service; and an ironic footnote

    Two site launches today worth noting: the return of e-petitions, and the ‘new’ Government Digital Service blog.

    E-petitions used to belong to Downing Street; now it’s moved over to Directgov, and thence to individual departments, rather than landing everything on the PM’s desk. There’s very little to see just now: just a submission form, and a few information pages. We won’t be able to see or ‘sign’ other people’s petitions for another week or so.

    It’s been built by the Skunkworks team, now under the more full-time management of Mark O’Neill – or to be more specific:

    #epetitions was put together by an onsite agile team of 3 devs, 1 PM, 1 customer + 1 part-time analyst, over three iterations. RoR stack.

    – tweet by @chrismdp

    … and so far, (update: nearly) everyone’s been jolly nice about it, particularly as there’s so little to see. Maybe they’ve seen what else is coming.

    The e-petition’s previous incarnation became notorious when 1.8 million people signed to protest against road pricing proposals. Its successor won’t have to wait long to face a similar challenge: the Guido Fawkes blog has already lodged a petition calling for the restoration of the death penalty for child and cop killers, and is planning a special campaign to reach the magic 100,000 signature barrier, (potentially) triggering a debate in the Commons. Good luck to whoever’s desk that lands on.

    One slight downer for me is that fact that it’s been redeveloped from scratch, using Ruby on Rails, rather than extending the existing MySociety-built platform (now being taken up by dozens of councils throughout the land). Tom Loosemore tells us: ‘ if [the new] code base isn’t open sourced, it won’t be for lack of will or encouragement!’ – but I just can’t see that being enough to see the application being reused more widely, particularly at local councils. Mark assures me that they did look at using WordPress, which would have guaranteed a high degree of reuse; I’m looking forward to reading his blog post about why they opted for the alternative approach.

    Speaking of which… the Government Digital Service has a ‘new’ blog, or rather, it has consolidated various previous efforts (including Alphagov and the Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog) into a new home, located at wordpress.com (where it joins, among others, UKTI and both the Army and Navy).

    They’re using the premium Linen theme, costing them $68, with a bit of graphic customisation; and a mapped domain for a further $17/year. And as it’s on wordpress.com, that’s pretty much all it’s cost them. (And purely because I’ve already been asked the question: no, I didn’t have any part in its creation. Well, apart from several years of ruthless evangelism.)

    Meanwhile, with more than a little irony… the Cabinet Office has also published its list of the 444 government websites still in operation, 243 of which are marked for closure. Neither of these sites is mentioned.

  • 15 Jul 2011
    e-government, technology
    cabinetoffice, catn, hosting, wordpress

    WordPress-based hosting solution in final stages of Cabinet Office cost-saving contest

    It’s great to see some positive coverage of the Cabinet Office’s Innovation Launchpad process at the Telegraph today; and with it, a very positive writeup for a company we’ve been building a partnership with.

    CatN first came to my attention when their commercial director, Joe Gardiner blogged last year about how the Department for Transport could save more than £750,000 per year by moving its website over to WordPress, running on CatN’s vCluster platform. A man very much after my own heart, clearly. And of course, last month, Transport – quite coincidentally? – migrated their website to WordPress.

    Joe worked his Transport calculations up into an entry into the Cabinet Office contest, with a tantalising promise to save government departments an average of 75% on their hosting costs – a minimum of £17.88 million per year – by moving over to WordPress. And as he tells the Telegraph in their article today, ‘one of their concerns is that we are offering to save them too much and that we can’t be a sustainable business.’

    The thing is – and this won’t come as any surprise to anyone reading this blog – such savings are absolutely possible.

    We’ve been working with CatN for a few months now, and we’re in no doubt that their services, costing hundreds of pounds per year, are at least a match for – and in most cases, far better than – the services departments are spending thousands on. And arguably more importantly, their heart is in it.

    So we’re wholeheartedly backing Joe and CatN in their efforts next week. For all the innovation going on around WordPress in government, there isn’t yet a strategic approach to hosting. It’s an idea whose time came a good while ago.

    CatN and Puffbox are both sponsors of WordCamp UK 2011, taking place this weekend in Portsmouth.

  • 8 Jul 2011
    company, politics, technology
    coopparty, jonworth, wordpress

    Puffbox develops new web platform for the Co-operative Party

    It takes a special kind of political anorak to even know that the Co-operative Party exists; so you might be surprised to learn that it’s actually the fourth largest political party in Westminster.

    Formed in 1917, it has been in a permanent electoral pact with Labour since 1927. In the current Parliament, 29 of Labour’s 250-odd MPs were actually elected as Labour & Co-operative candidates – including one Ed Balls. A good number of other Labour MPs are paid-up members of the Party, but aren’t actually sponsored by it. It depends on the Co-operative Group – yes, as in corner shops, banking, funerals, etc – for a large part of its funding.

    And since I have a ‘loyalty card’ for my local corner shop, I suppose I should formally declare an interest: I am a part-owner of the Co-operative Group. A very, very, very small part indeed. But technically, still an owner.

    For the past few months, Puffbox has been working alongside left-leaning digital specialist Jon Worth to help the Party up its game online. And in doing so, we had to up our own game too: it’s unquestionably the most intricate WordPress build I’ve ever done – with a multisite-based strategy, (double) wildcard DNS, four custom post types, two automated custom taxonomies, and a parent/child theme arrangement, both offering full visual customisation. See what I mean?

    To give you some idea of how it all stitches together: each of the Party’s Parliamentarians has a ‘person page’. You can click on ‘People‘ in the navigation bar to see them all, or hover for various filtered views. Say, for example, Members of Parliament. Oh look, there’s Ed Balls.

    Click on his name, and you’ll see a ‘person page’. At the top of it are links to his Twitter account, and his personal website. Then there’s a concise biography. And towards the bottom, a ‘snapshot box’ for his latest activity on Twitter, in Hansard, on Flickr, and on his personal website, plus any content on the site itself which mentions him… all populated and updated automatically.

    For those interested in the technical side: ‘person’ is a custom post type, with an extra metabox for the various external content sources. There’s a custom taxonomy called ‘role’, which is how we know Ed Balls is an MP. (And of course, each person can have multiple roles: here’s an example.) We pull the tweets in via JSON, to avoid API limiting; the other external data comes via RSS feeds. And of course, there’s a custom display template to stitch it all together. Meanwhile, invisibly, there’s also a people taxonomy on posts, which syncs with any changes to the person record.

    And, uh, there’s something similar for areas of policy. But you’ll just have to work that out for yourselves. 🙂

    The ‘main’ site will be complemented by a handful of distinct subsites, within the same WordPress multi-site install. There’s still some fleshing-out to be done, but you can see sites for the party in Scotland and Wales starting to come together. They use the same core theme, with the ability to change the background and header images; but will be managed on a day-to-day basis by the Party’s regional operations. Regular readers will recognise the influence of our work with Defra

    Visually, it’s not the richest design I’ve ever done, but that’s entirely in keeping with the ethos of a party which doesn’t actually have a logo per se. We’ve kept things nice and simple, concentrating on clarity and ease of navigation. But as it’s turned out, there’s been a lot of very positive feedback about the look and feel, so we’re confident we got it ‘right’ for the client and their audience.

    Thanks go to my own co-operators on this project: Simon Wheatley, for his technical assistance and inspiration. Jon Worth, for putting the project together. Martin at the Co-op Party (see his person page), who’s been an absolute star – and is already on his way to becoming a WordPress expert. And finally, to WordPress 3.x, without which none of this would have even been conceivable.

  • 7 Jul 2011
    technology
    polaroid

    The many uses of a Polaroid Pogo printer

    I’m amazed quite how much use I’m getting out of the Polaroid Pogo printer I bought out of sheer curiosity on a rainy afternoon a few months ago. Roughly the size of your hand, from wrist to fingertips, it prints photo stickers about the size of a business card. All done via Bluetooth, so there’s no need to even plug it in. Switch it on, send the file over, wait a minute, and bingo.

    The quality, frankly, isn’t brilliant. But as the parent of two young girls, we seem to be finding regular excuses to use it. Illustrating school reports, enhancing greetings cards, that kind of thing. So much quicker and easier than printing, cutting out and Pritt-sticking. You’re looking at £30-40 for the printer (although I think I got mine for a bit less?), then about 12p per photo, which right now seems very reasonable.

  • 17 Jun 2011
    technology

    How did I ever cope without BuiltWith?

    Least surprising news of the day… 🙂

    A site I’ve found myself using a lot recently, is BuiltWith.com – several times most days in fact. Basically, you give it a URL, and it churns out a nice list of the web technology the site uses.

    You can go to builtwith.com and enter the URL, like Google; or you can drag their bookmarklet into your web browser interface, to give yourself one-click access to the report on whatever site you’re looking at.

    What I’ve done, though, is add it as a ‘Tool’ within the must-have Web Developer toolbar for Firefox. And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re well used to that particular add-on. It’s dead easy to configure:

    • On the toolbar, click on Tools > Edit Tools > Add
    • Enter a sensible name, plus a keyboard shortcut if you want one
    • Change the ‘tool type’ from Application to URL
    • Paste http://builtwith.com/? (with the question mark) into the URL box
    • Then press OK, and you’re done

    You’ll now have an option for BuiltWith in your Tools menu, along with services like HTML and feed validation.

  • 24 May 2011
    e-government, technology
    microsoft, wordpress

    Microsoft thanks WordPress for dropping IE6 support

    As I noted here a while back, there could be bad news on the way for government people running WordPress sites: the next release of WordPress, version 3.2, will discontinue support for Internet Explorer version 6. Here’s how the new WP dashboard will look, courtesy of Automattic’s Jane Wells:

    Ouch. Now, Microsoft has published its official reaction on the Exploring IE blog – and it might come as a bit of a surprise.

    Last week, WordPress dropped support for IE6 and joined the hundreds of other web sites that are working to move enterprises and consumers alike to a modern browser platform. Thank you! … The additional developer work supporting IE6 and even IE7 is something we would love to see be a thing of the past. More than that, however, is the security concern.

    Of course – and I say this as someone who used to work there – it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t a sales message dropped in somewhere; and the blog post turns into a pitch to upgrade to Windows 7 on security grounds. But the point about developer effort is still entirely valid – trust me.

    Out of interest: are any government readers facing a crisis next month, when the upgrade happens? Anyone running websites on WordPress, with only IE6 available to them? (Feel free to contact me directly.)

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