Puffbox

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

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    Our new Defra site plays nicely with PDFs

    In the late March dash to complete jobs before the end of the financial year, not to mention the imminent election declaration, I pushed a couple of websites live without having the time to blog about them.

    One of these was another little job for Defra: a WordPress-based satellite site for their Science Advisory Council. It’s a fairly modest site, sticking very closely to Defra’s house style, and based to a significant extent on previous work I’ve done for them. But it does have one innovation worth flagging.

    The site’s main objective is transparency, making documents from its quarterly meetings publicly available. Inevitably, like it or not, that means a lot of PDF files. WordPress’s media library function makes it easy to upload these as attachments to posts (or indeed, pages): but we had the idea to take things a step further.

    One underused feature of WordPress is the ability to add ‘custom taxonomies’: distinct classifications based on either the (hierarchical) category or (freeform) tagging model. But if you’re smart about it, you can also hook this same functionality into the media library – allowing you to add ‘tags’ to the documents you upload. And once you’re doing that, you can benefit from all the other features you’re used to with tags and categories.

    So there’s a page on the SAC site which presents this custom taxonomy (unimaginatively labelled ‘Upload tags’) as a tag cloud. Click on a tag, and it takes you to an archive page of all uploads (ie PDFs) relevant to that tag – eg meeting minutes – which can be based on a special page template. (And you can also get RSS feeds of each element in the custom taxonomy, by adding ‘/feed’ to the URL in the usual way.)

    We’ve also written a routine into the standard post template to extract details of attached files, and present them automatically in a nice table, with a bit of automated metadata too – see this page as an example.

    There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t rely on PDF as your primary publishing channel; but sometimes, you have to accept it’s the only practical solution. And in this case, I hope we’ve shown it’s possible to make something of a virtue of it.

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    Live text commentary in WordPress

    I don’t usually blog about projects until after they’ve happened; but I’m going to make an exception for something that’s going to happen later today.

    For just about a year, we’ve been looking after the website for The Big Care Debate, the government’s large-scale consultation on the funding of long-term social care. We’ve had a great relationship with the team at the Department of Health, and we’ve done some fun, innovative and highly effective things: commentable documents, Facebook activity, online questionnaires, even user-submitted photo galleries.

    The consultation process is reaching its conclusion, with the publication of the government White Paper on the subject. (For those who don’t know the jargon: a ‘green paper’ presents options or starts a debate, often leading to a ‘white paper’, which is a declaration of government policy.) Oh, and as you might have noticed, there’s an election on the cards, and we’ve already had a few skirmishes on this very subject.

    When we first met to discuss plans for the White Paper publication, one idea was to ‘live tweet’ the launch event on Twitter; but I’ve never been a fan of sudden, frantic bursts of tweeting by one of the hundred-odd accounts I follow. (And indeed, I’ve ‘unfollowed’ certain people for doing precisely that.) So we reworked the plan, taking as our inspiration the undoubted success of the BBC’s ‘live text commentaries’ – seen at its best on the sports site on a Saturday afternoon, but used with increasing frequency on the news site, for set-piece events like PMQs.

    So over lunchtime, we’ll be supplementing our live video stream with a live text commentary – using ajax and some custom WordPress wizardry. It’s a very simple concept at heart. A live commentary is just a chronologically-presented series of short text chunks… just like a list of comments on a post. So that’s what we’re going to use.

    The site editor will be entering his comments via a hidden, ajax-powered comment form: and, as with any WordPress comment, he’ll benefit from features like automatic text formatting, including conversion of URLs into clickable links. Meanwhile, users will see each new comment appended to the bottom of the list, with a cute colour highlight, but without the need for a full page refresh.

    Naturally, this means a much increased workload for the web server, particularly if – as we expect – we attract a sizable audience for what looks like being front-page news. WordPress and its plugin collection can do a lot to help; but we’ve taken a few additional server-level steps to ensure all runs smoothly. All the credit for this goes to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley, who knows a thing or two about these things, thanks in part to his work for Stephen Fry.

    There are plenty of options for running live text commentaries like this, such as the excellent CoverItLive. But there are a number of benefits to running it within WordPress: not least the fact that afterwards, you’ll instantly have a bullet-point summary of the key points at your disposal. And as we’ve been building the functionality, we’ve been getting quite excited at other ways we could use it.

    If you’re at a keyboard at lunchtime, please drop by, and let me know how you find it.

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    Defra's new WordPress comment platform

    Over the last few months we’ve been doing a few little projects with Defra: first came the UK Location (micro)site, and I mentioned there was ‘at least one more’ in the pipeline.

    The second project emerged a few days back: a ‘commentable page’ platform, in the style (as Steph rightly observed) of the now-legendary Commentariat theme. In fact, I handed over my part of the work some time ago; but the Defra team have taken things a step or two further, embedding it even deeper into their ‘house style’.

    This kind of ‘new light through old windows’ work – where I build a WordPress site to match or slot into an existing design – has probably accounted for about half my (new) projects over the last six months or so. It’s much quicker for me, and hence much cheaper for clients. It’s usually as simple as referencing the parent site’s CSS files; stripping their page templates down to empty shells; then dropping in the required WordPress functions, and building new CSS around them as necessary. It cuts my bill by about 50%, maybe more. And because you’re removing most, if not all, of the subjective elements, things tend to run much more smoothly too.

    Maybe this is a pointer for how we can take WordPress deeper into large corporates. It isn’t about replacing your entire Existing Arrangement with a young upstart like WordPress in one fell swoop. Inevitably, certain sections of your website will lend themselves better than others to WordPress’s natural preference for chronological presentation, commenting, RSS feeds, tagging, and so on. And if you’re smart in terms of how you code it all, how you structure your navigation, and how you pass data around (most likely using RSS feeds), the join can be made barely visible.

    If you’re looking for a nice example of this: look at the integration of www.parliament.uk and news.parliament.uk: the latter runs on WordPress, and delivers its content – including images, by the way – back into the parent site via RSS. (Disclosure: I had a very minor role in it.)

    For those interested in the technical details: it’s a WordPress MU installation (although of course, that won’t matter for long); meaning the Defra team are able to generate new sites under the ‘engage’ subdomain with just a couple of clicks. I think they’ve altered the default theme I handed over, for tighter integration into the site structure; but even then, it’s just a case of editing the HTML around the WordPress code, all of which will be instantly familiar as it’s using their existing stylesheet.

    We’ve got one more project with Defra in the works: hoping to get it out there within the next couple of weeks.

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    Our modest microsite for UKTI

    Monday saw a gathering of 250 leading figures from the world of business at London’s Saatchi Gallery; and organisers UK Trade & Investment asked Puffbox to put together a microsite for the event. With minimal advance publicity, few official post-conference outputs, and no particular involvement for the general public, we felt the best approach was to work up a relatively modest ‘one page site’ idea, ‘mashing up’ material from numerous external sources.

    For the past few months I’ve been falling in love with javascript library jQuery; and I wanted to make use of what I’d learned – partly to enrich the user experience above that of a fairly static page, but also to simplify its management. So there’s a nice little sideways-scrolling video playlist – which uses jQuery not only for the animation effect, but also to wrap the content in the necessary HTML markup. Each set of three videos needs to be contained in an LI tag; but doing that manually would have been a nightmare, especially when it came to adding new videos midway down the list – so jQuery does it on my behalf.

    When you click to play a video, it loads in the page’s main panel – and generates a few extras too. We’re offering YouTube’s little-known short URL format for easier sharing; social buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Delicious; plus a (somewhat experimental) click-to-copy button, which triggers a rather cute colour trick when you press it. None of it rocket science, but it all helps make things a little more user-friendly, and hopefully a bit more memorable.

    (If you’re keen to know how any of it was done, a peek at the source code should reveal all.)

    It was a little strange to find myself right back at the coalface, hand-coding HTML pages in real-time: it’s been a good few years, probably dating back to my time at the Foreign Office or Sky News since I’ve had to do that. (Yes folks, that’s right – no WordPress this time.) And inevitably, with various people producing various things in various places – all also in real time, a significant proportion of the effort went on coordination rather than pure web development.

    This wasn’t a website on the scale of, say, FCO’s efforts for the London Summit last year. But given what we had, in terms of both time and material available, I’m definitely pleased with it. Looks pretty, thanks to designer Matt; with some cute interactions, thanks to jQuery; and relatively easy to maintain on the day. I’m particularly grateful to UKTI, who were an ideal client in many respects – telling us the end result they wanted, and allowing us to work out how best to do it.

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    Networked blogs: our latest science experiment

    Over the last couple of months I’ve been working with Steph Gray and his BIS colleagues to build a modest little family of websites which could have far-reaching consequences.

    As Steph notes on his own blog, I’ve long been musing openly about seeing corporate websites as clusters of smaller websites: making a virtue of the silo mentality, if you like. Give each sub-unit a full-featured website, with hands-on control of content, their own ‘latest news’ stream, the ability to activate and manage reader comments. Let the technology platform enforce a certain degree of consistency, and centralised control. Lay a unifying ‘front end’ over the top, to promote the day’s most important developments, and assist with search and navigation.

    It also tied in neatly to a question I’ve been asked quite a few times lately: what’s the maximum number of pages a WordPress build can handle? In a single ‘page tree’, I’ve helped run sites with hundreds of pages – and whilst it’s perfectly serviceable, it’s hardly ideal. But maybe it’s the single page tree that’s the problem there. How about if, instead of a 100-page structure, you had 10 structures each of 10 pages?

    The opportunity to test the theory arose when Steph approached me about BIS’s Science and Society site – which, as it happens, had been Steph’s first WordPress build (whilst still in DIUS). What better audience for such an experiment than the science community?

    We replaced ‘ordinary’ WordPress with WordPress MU (‘multi user’), and I built a more flexible MU-friendly theme, maintaining the same basic look and feel. There’s a top-level ‘family’ navigation, representing the various individual subsites; and with a line or two of CSS, we can give subsite its own colour scheme. There’s a special ‘homepage’ template for subsite use, driven primarily by widgets. And at the top level, we’re actually aggregating the subsites’ RSS feeds to produce a ‘latest across the whole site’ listing and RSS feed.

    It’s a tricky time to be doing the project, on numerous fronts. BIS are working on launching a redesigned (non-WP) site, hence the new blue branding along the top. WordPress v3.0 is on the horizon, integrating MU’s multi-user aspect into the core product, with as yet unknown consequences. Oh, and in case you’d missed it, there’s an election on the cards, not to mention a purdah period leading up to it – and who-knows-what afterwards. So things have been a bit quick-and-dirtier than I’d usually allow; but I saw no point getting bogged down in detail when everything could be up for grabs imminently.

    Steph has used a deliberately provocative title on his post – ‘One day, all of this will be blogs.’ Is that an overstatement? Perhaps, but aren’t we seeing blogging steadily take over other forms of communication?

    If teams really do want to connect with their stakeholders (hate that word), and operate transparently, and permit two-way conversations – this model would give them the platform they need. A single WordPress MU build makes the maintenance of the network (almost) as straightforward as a single blog – and allows a degree of control to be kept at the centre. The stakeholders can have all the RSS feeds and email alerts they could desire. It doesn’t resolve the human and organisational / cultural aspects: but it clears the way for those to be tackled, if we really want to.

    I think it can work: it’s the logical ‘next step’ for WordPress’s journey into the corporate world, surely. Do I think it will work? I honestly don’t know. I’ll be watching with interest.

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    Photo-sharing function for Health consultation

    One of my longest-running projects has been the consultation around Care and Support, and the creation of a National Care Service. It’s been a huge engagement process on many fronts, moving through numerous phases – and the website has reflected that, with frequent changes, additions and updates.

    The latest enhancement went live last week – and effectively grafts Flickr-like photo functionality on top of WordPress. We’re asking people to submit photos which illustrate the issue from their perspective, with the prospect of including the best ones in the White Paper due later this year.

    Now I’ll confess, I wasn’t too convinced by the idea initially. Would we get any response at all? Would the photos be any good? Would people take the issues seriously? But I’m happy to admit my instincts were wrong this time: yes, people are sending in their photos, and yes, some of them are fantastic.

    The upload function is based around the TDO Mini Forms plugin: not always the easiest to work with, but it opens up all sorts of possibilities. In a perfect world we’d maybe have tried to do a really slick upload form: TDOMF relies on an iframe, with some downside in terms of usability. But it’s good enough, and it was up and running in next to no time. All submissions are moderated prior to publication: and thankfully, TDOMF makes this as easy as normal WP comments.

    If you know Flickr, you’ll immediately see echoes of its design in the custom templates I’ve done – and yes, that’s entirely deliberate. Since it’s fulfilling the same basic purpose, it made sense to use the same basic presentation. We considered using Flickr itself, but didn’t feel too comfortable with its rules on ‘commercial’ groups: maybe we could have pleaded non-profit status, but it wasn’t worth spending time on. (Comment functionality is of course present on the site; but it was decided not to open comments on these pages.)

    I doubt there’s a place for this in many consultations; but I’m glad we’ve been able to prove it can be done – and that there are people out there, willing to get involved. A soft engagement success story in the making, I hope.

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    UK Location: our new microsite for Defra

    One department making steady steps into WordPress has been Defra: it started with a ‘public beta’ blog on third sector issues late in 2008, then a Commentariat-based consultation in mid-2009. I’ve been working with them since late last year, and the first fruits of that relationship are now starting to appear.

    First to go public is a microsite for the UK Location Programme – which you probably won’t have heard of, but is all about EU-wide interoperability in geographic data, so it may well be of interest. They needed a website which they could manage themselves, rather than through the central Defra web team; and were open to online consultation methods. Ideal WordPress territory, in other words.

    The site is closely modelled on the Defra corporate site, even going so far as to use the same base stylesheet. Behind the scenes, it’s the usual combination of WordPress posts and pages, with the former handling news updates, and the latter everything else. Inevitably we were looking at lots of downloadable PDFs and Office documents; so I’ve done a custom ‘widget’ to display the latest file uploads (excluding images), with the appropriate filetype icons.

    The human element on this one could be interesting too. The project’s communications manager is an iPhone owner; and we’ve already experimented (successfully) with him updating the site via the excellent WordPress iPhone app. All being well, you’ll never notice; but it opens up all sorts of possibilities.

    The site is sitting in some modestly-priced ‘sandbox’ hosting space, and came together in less than a week. In quite a few respects, it’s more advanced than the main Defra site; and I’m hoping they’ll see how WordPress could help at the top level too. Watch out for at least one more Puffbox-Defra collaboration in the next few weeks.

  • Lynne Featherstone redesign pays off

    My friend / colleague / client Mark Pack gave a presentation at last week’s Social Media 09 conference on ‘Liberal Democrats and social media’: in fact, it was a case study on the work we did to relaunch Lynne Featherstone’s website. Although they don’t make much sense in isolation (nor should they), here they are for the record:

    (I wasn’t present to hear Iain Dale declare the site ‘one of the best political websites [he’d] ever seen’, but I am assured it’s an accurate transcription – from his opening remarks at a LibDem Conference fringe meeting, I’m told.)

    Mark’s analysis yields one interesting result for anyone in political social media: despite being exactly the same mechanism, and often identical content, there’s a marked preference for ‘blog’ content as opposed to the more conventional ‘news releases’. Mark has crunched the numbers, but actually, it’s obvious from even the briefest glance: the blog posts get comments, the news releases (almost) never do.

    But here’s my favourite fact about the relaunch. One of Lynne’s core campaigning messages is how she stands up to the Labour-dominated Haringey council. And if you search Google for ‘haringey council’, Lynne’s automated ‘issue page’ (with its far-from-flattering meta description) is result no5 behind the council itself (twice), Directgov and Wikipedia. I’m quite pleased with that; they probably aren’t.

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    New site for National Student Forum

    studentforum

    Today sees the launch of the latest little site we’ve built on behalf of – or more accurately, in collaboration with – BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. It’s a pretty straightforward WordPress build for something called the National Student Forum: a panel representing HE students’ interests, whose latest annual report was published this morning.

    It started out as a fairly simple project, to do the ‘commentable document’ thing around the new Annual Report. But it soon became obvious that, for various practical and structural reasons, the only sensible thing to do was to remake the Forum’s entire site. (Er, all half a dozen pages of it.) And although it’s still a fairly small site, it’s been built with future flexibility in mind, should it ever be needed.

    I’ve put a lot of work into the visual aspects this time: it’s a big, bold design drawing heavily on the style of the printed publication. There’s a cute little routine which allows you to specify the header image for a given page. We’re using Scribd.com to host the PDF files, allowing us to embed them back into our pages with Flash; but I’ve used a bit of Javascript to hold it all back until it’s required. The site will use comment threading, which isn’t (yet?) the norm: I’ll be watching to see if the users are comfortable with it. And all turned round in less than a week. A fun job.

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    The reality of cheap web hosting

    Since I started building sites using WordPress, I’ve tended to use cheap hosting – very cheap hosting. I’ve run high-profile government websites quite comfortably on shared hosting deals costing £50 a year, or less. Some had daily page views running into the thousands; at least one was for 10 Downing Street. It seemed in keeping with the low-cost ethic, and it didn’t let me down.

    But over the last few months, I’ve come to understand a bit more about how cheap hosting actually works. The reality, I’ve realised, is that all web hosting is effectively free of charge. When you pay a fee for hosting, you’re really paying for support – or perhaps more accurately, the promise of support when you need it. An insurance policy, in other words.

    Looking back, I can recite instances where a cheap hosting company has suspended accounts unilaterally and without warning, because traffic or other activity hit a notional limit. Or where a global setting was changed on a shared webserver, breaking key functionality on one of my sites. For the vast majority of their clients, these wouldn’t have been problematic: most websites won’t trouble their traffic limits, or use difficult functionality. But mine did.

    Cheap hosting means zero tolerance. You aren’t paying them enough to employ someone to get in touch proactively before things go wrong; or to respond to your anguish afterwards. They will employ unilateral limits, and make unilateral changes, based solely on a cold analysis of what will suit the majority of clients. Based on automated tests and calculations, not human beings. I’m not blaming them; you can’t really expect them to do anything else.

    But that isn’t good enough for serious publishing efforts. They do deserve better – advance warnings, responsive support in a crisis, proactive maintenance to stop bad things ever happening. And that comes at a price.

    In the context of my crowdsourced business plan, one emerging idea is long-term site support. In a WordPress context, that means updating the underlying technology; updating WordPress itself; updating themes and plugins; and at each stage, testing to make sure everything still works as intended. So I’m talking to some people about the possibility of providing a WordPress-optimised, centrally managed hosting service, aimed at government and corporate usage. We feel WordPress has reached a certain level of maturity, and it’s probably time the hosting arrangements did so too.

    If we do it, it’ll be the best, slickest, smoothest, friendliest, smartest, most tailored solution we can imagine. But it won’t be cheap.