Public image
I use Flickr quite a lot - but almost exclusively for family stuff. The main attraction was the ability to send automated email notifications to family members who spend more reasonable amounts of time than myself in front of computer monitors. And since Flickr connectivity is built into any self-respecting mobile device nowadays (including some [...] Read on »
Lane Fox review hints at further rationalisation
Martha Lane Fox's review of Directgov appears to have taken a slightly wider view than simply how well everyone's favourite orange website works. Speaking at a conference in Birmingham, Cabinet Office director of digital delivery Graham Walker said: We've been doing a review of Directgov and most of government on the web. We can see [...] Read on »
Thoughts on Drupal 7
Nobody's saying that Drupal isn't a capable publishing platform, or that v7 isn't an improvement. But it's still the same old Drupal underneath: a platform aimed at the geeks, not the users. And those behind it have admitted as much. Read on »
Culture blogging with Movable Type
I've only just come across the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's blogging server, running on Movable Type. Departmental CIO Mark O'Neill certainly kept that one quiet, when he came along to Word Up Whitehall last week. Started back in June, it consists primarily of posts by junior ministers John Penrose and Hugh Robertson - [...] Read on »
An alliterative summary of Word Up Whitehall
There's no point writing a session-by-session summary of last Wednesday's Word Up Whitehall event, when Julia Chandler has done such a fine job of it already. So instead, here are my memories of the common themes which came out of the various sessions and fringe discussions. And picking up from one of the day's presentations, [...] Read on »
Word Up Whitehall: in tweets
More for the record than anything else: the tweets from #WordUpWhitehall yesterday, captured by Steph Gray. Read on »
Word Up Whitehall today
Big day today: it's Word Up Whitehall, the mini-WordCamp for UK central government people, which I've been putting together over the last month or two. I thought it might generate some interest, but I never imagined it would 'sell out' in just over 24 hours... and I'm nervously hearing people already talking about 'the next [...] Read on »
Culture builds transparency site on WP
Nice to see the team at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport launching a new WordPress-based site this week, for the distribution and archival of their transparency data. They promise the monthly publication of financial data, with others 'as appropriate (at least annually)'. Data is being posted as CSV, as per official guidance, and [...] Read on »
Always keep hosting, domains and email separate
A quick technical tip for my loyal and esteemed readership: when setting up a modest website, don't buy your domains from your web host. And ideally, get your email from somewhere else too. One of the second-order selling points for an open-source solution like WordPress is disaster recovery. In a worst-case scenario, you can simply [...] Read on »
Wales Office gets a WordPress refresh
The Wales Office was where the whole WordPress-in-Whitehall thing started, back in late 2007. As a relatively tiny department whose communications were almost exclusively news-based, a blog-style website was ideal for them. But I still remember nervously going into our first meeting, conscious that we were proposing something quite radical. It all went remarkably well; [...] Read on »