November 24, 2009
Just a quick one to flag for readers who get my stuff by RSS that I’ve got a parallel tumblog alongside this main blog, which I use to post up quick reviews of tools that I like for web work. I’ve called it A Load Of Cobblers, to celebrate the spirit and practice of cobbled-together…
September 21, 2009
There’s plenty of WordPress-powered online properties in Government right now and some very busy freelancers building them. For a while now, I’ve been trying to compile a list of useful people, agencies, tools and resources for WordPress, so I thought I’d kick it off here. It’s obviously incomplete, and mention here does not necessarily constitute…
September 17, 2009
When BIS was created, we were pretty chuffed to have got a solid website built and launched in 72 hours. But as the weeks passed and the organisation started to build up achievements and an identity of its own, people started to ask when something, y’know, a bit meatier was going to arrive. Today, we…
August 28, 2009
Recently, I’ve been grappling with the issue of what a corporate homepage should do. Obviously, a lot of what I do is central government-oriented but in this case I’ve been casting the net quite wide, as the interface design problems of corporate organisations in whatever sector are actually pretty similar. A corporate homepage generally isn’t…
August 4, 2009
This being a personal blog and all, I thought I’d share a preview of a little development project I’ve been working on recently not linked to the day job: inboxlistening.com Why does the world need another online monitoring tool? There’s Google Alerts to get news and blog mentions by email. There’s Netvibes or Pageflakes if…
June 11, 2009
Imagine – hypothetically – you go to work on a Friday morning, and by 5pm (after a busy day of coffee and muffins), your organisation technically doesn’t exist any more. After the initial flurry of rebranding, you decide you need a holding website of some sort, to tell people about the newly-branded organisation while you…
May 26, 2009
As well as the questions on social media that Neil asked of his recent interviewees, he also grilled them on some of the practical issues of being a jobbing government webby (something he has also covered brilliantly recently). One particular question – to which we didn’t really hear a corking answer from any of the…
March 17, 2009
The Cabinet Office has recently relaunched its Civil Service website and job search function, including a little ‘Developers‘ page tucked away in the footer. That page describes a rather lovely little API which lets anyone – with a freely-available key – retrieve a list of departments, vacancies and vacancy descriptions, including RDFa markup to the…
March 7, 2009
One of the most rewarding things about open sourcing your stuff – for example, some code we developed for an internal project – is seeing what clever people do with it in ways you wouldn’t expect. At my talk at eDemocracy 08, I put up the chart below to try to illustrate four of the…
February 27, 2009
As Harry’s explained over on The Dextrous Web, we’ve just open sourced the code behind ConsultationXML, the tool we’ve been working on which turns consultation PDF files into XML. It’s a 0.1 release so still full of bugs, but at least it’s out there. You can download the (documented) code, and/or have a play with…
