Puffbox

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

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    Creative Commons coming to data.gov.uk

    There’s something almost unnerving about the launch of a government website getting so much positive coverage. But today’s been data.gov.uk‘s big day, and everyone seems to agree it’s a jolly good thing. For now.

    James Crabtree’s piece for Prospect magazine hails it as ‘a tale of star power, serendipity, vision, persistence and an almost unprecedented convergence of all levels of government’. The New Statesman says it’s ‘a far more radical project than it first appears… a clear break with the closed, data-hugging state of the past.’ We’re all getting quite excitable, aren’t we?

    Me? I’m just looking back over posts on this blog last year: this one about the need to make moves on data release (including an excerpt from my resignation letter from ONS), and this one on Tim Berners-Lee’s appointment. I’ll confess, I got something wrong in that latter post; I wrote that it was ‘probably’ a cult-of-celebrity, hands-off appointment. Looks like that wasn’t entirely accurate. Sorry.

    This has been a long time coming. Too long. Shamefully long. But there is still good reason to be excited. Amid all the talk about bicycle accidents, you may have missed the news that OPSI is working on simplified T&Cs for reuse of the site’s data:

    These terms and conditions have been aligned so that they are interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. The terms and conditions are also machine readable meaning that the licence is presented and coded in such a way that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions too.

    This is the first major step towards the adoption of a non-transactional, Creative Commons style approach to licensing the re-use of government information. The new model will replace the existing Click-Use Licence. We are working towards the launch of the new licence model by the end of May 2010.

    Don’t overlook the significance of this move. This is government adopting someone else’s standard, for something they have historically claimed as their own. The Click-Use Licence is actually pretty liberal… but it’s scary.

    This simple shift will take us from this:

    Unless otherwise specified the information on this site is covered by either Crown Copyright, Crown Database Right or has been licensed to the Crown. It is your responsibility to clear any other rights. You are encouraged to use and re-use the information that is available on and through this site freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions…

    to this (or something very like it). We, the citizens of the web, know what Creative Commons means: we don’t need to look it up, we won’t need a dictionary, and we won’t need a lawyer. Good things will happen as a direct result.

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    A few freeware recommendations

    It’s taking a while to get my 2010 blogging up to speed – so I thought I’d share a couple of the utilities which have been making life with Windows a little easier.

    One which took a while to get used to, but is now a must-have, is the open-source Launchy. I was finding my Windows Start Menu getting over-full – to the extent that it took a good few seconds to even open. (Admittedly a memory boost later helped.) So I was looking for a way to avoid having to open the Start Menu at all – and that’s Launchy.

    You press Alt+space, and you get a text input window – into which you can start to type a program name, a folder name, a filename, a custom command… you get the picture. Launchy lists anything which matches whatever you type in, as you type it in – and when you see what you want, hit ‘enter’… and it happens.

    Even better, it learns which are your favourite applications for any given combination of keystrokes: so when I want to activate my local web development environment, all I need to type in is ‘w’, and it knows what I probably want. It may not sound like a massive productivity boost – but you might be amazed just how much time you spend navigating around your Windows environment.

    (There’s an equivalent for the Mac called Quicksilver; and for Linux, Gnome Do. I can’t vouch for Quicksilver, but I’m spending more and more of my time with Ubuntu, and Gnome Do is starting to become an essential part of that experience too.)

    My other recommendation is MaxTo for Windows – which actually makes 1920×1080 monitors make sense. I bought a new HD-resolution monitor last summer, and found myself overwhelmed with the available pixel space. Full-screen applications don’t make sense at that resolution, but there’s no built-in mechanism to make windows ‘maximise’ to anything smaller.

    When you first run MaxTo, it asks you to define a grid layout which suits you. So for example, I’ve got a full-height, 1024-wide area for ‘full screen’ web browsing; an 800×600 (ish) window which I tend to use for text editing / coding; and two narrow columns for Explorer windows, Javascript error console, odds and ends like that. Then, when you press the ‘maximise’ button on a window, it expands to fill the area it’s in.

    It’s the only way I’ve found, on any operating system, to get the screen layout I want – reliably, consistently, and instantly. It’s like having a multi-monitor setup on a single unit, and was precisely what I needed. MaxTo ceased to be freeware last year some time, but if you look around – eg here, you’ll find older versions.

  • Geolocation: getting worse?

    Credit: Roo Reynolds

    About a year ago, I ran a short experiment, with the assistance of the various misguided fools who choose to follow me on Twitter. I was intrigued by the possibilities offered by the geolocation element within Google’s javascript API. With one line of code, you could theoretically make a good guess as to where the user was physically located – and could tailor the page content accordingly. But did the theory hold up?

    The answer – sadly – was no, not really. When it worked, it was brilliant; but all too often, it didn’t work. Some ISPs reported curious results; sometimes it gave an error; some ISPs seemed to block it outright. So my conclusion then was that ‘it’s not really good enough to make meaningful use of’.

    One year later, and I’m working on a few websites for MPs/candidates ahead of the general election. One specific project involves a front-bencher with interests at both local and national level. It would be great if we could show local-level things to people in the constituency, and national-level things to people outside. Had the Google API improved at all?

    Sadly – no. In fact, if anything, it had got worse. Mobile seems to be a particular blackspot: nobody using a phone reported a success. And the various changes in the ISP market don’t seem to have helped. We had people in Leeds and Manchester being told they were in London, and people in Reading being told they were in Glasgow.

    So I’m reluctantly abandoning the work I’d done on automatic location detection. Instead, we’ll show you one view (either ‘local’ or ‘national’) by default, with an obvious method to switch to the other; and will drop a cookie each time you switch, so you’ll see the same view when you return next time.  Not a bad Plan B, really.

    There’s no doubt in my mind, ‘proper’ geolocation is going to be a very big deal – but for the foreseeable future it’ll be dependent on people running the most modern browsing technology. That’s fine for mobiles; but we live in a world where IE6 still refuses to go away. (Actually… according to this source, IE6 is the single most popular browser version out there?!)

    Picture: Roo Reynolds, Flickr

  • 2009: the year I became a developer (sort of)

    When I started in this business, I made a conscious decision not to become a programmer. I knew I had it in me: if I could crack Latin, I could certainly crack PHP. But I’ve always recognised that I’m better ‘across the board’ than most people I come across in the field. There just aren’t that many people who can appreciate design and development and editorial and Westminster. And besides, if I decided I wanted to be a developer, I’d have to concentrate 100% on it.

    And yet somehow, at some point during the summer of 2009, I started cranking out more and more ambitious code. My PHP efforts went beyond straightforward HTML templates with WordPress tags dropped in. I wasn’t scared to look at javascript. Next thing I know, I’m writing WordPress plugins and pretty advanced javascript/Ajax routines. I’m scraping web pages in their thousands, to get data in the form I want. All stuff I knew was possible, and probably understood on a superficial level – but here I am, doing it. Dammit. So how on earth did I get here?

    A lot of it is down to WordPress, which acted as a gateway into the depths of PHP. You can achieve a heck of a lot in WordPress with fairly sketchy PHP knowledge – following the Codex‘s instructions, and not asking too many questions. But inevitably I found myself wanting to dig a little deeper: to understand why certain things did what they did, and to find out what other options were available. I realised I’d unconsciously picked up quite a lot of the basics, enough to understand the more complex concepts.

    It’s also been the availability and maturity of certain tools: in particular JQuery and SimplePie. The former is the perfect route into javascript, making pretty advanced techniques seem as straightforward as CSS. The latter makes it laughably easy to work with RSS – opening the doors to all sorts of possibilities, where feeds are available. It’s also been extremely helpful to find a couple of CSS frameworks I’m comfortable with, namely YUI and 960.gs – simplifying the layout process and letting me devote my time to other aspects of the work.

    Part of it, too, has been the challenges thrown up by several key projects. For example, there was a moment in the Lynne Featherstone project where I discovered an unexpectedly huge amount of unstructured HTML content to be imported. I’d never looked at screen-scraping in much detail: sure, I’d played around with it, but I’d never yet had a reason to get my hands seriously dirty with it. To my great relief, I came up with a (so far) reliable method for scraping entire websites into a format suitable for WordPress import… and I’ve had cause to use it on a couple of other projects already. Necessity, being the mother of invention, has added several such strings to my bow.

    And I have to say, meeting some great people through the year – particularly within the WordPress community – has been a further encouragement. It turns out, developers can be relatively nice, relatively normal guys. Blimey, one or two of them might even qualify as cool.

    I’m not ‘one of them’ yet, nor do I ultimately want to be. I’m still in awe of, and slightly intimidated by, the really good ones. I’m sure a real developer would look at some of my work, and laugh. But by and large, my stuff works as well as it has to work. And even if it doesn’t, we can call it a prototype until someone more skilled can come along and do it properly. 🙂

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    Wireframes? Specs? Ha.

    I’ve added a lengthy comment to Stephen Hale’s recent blog post about preparations for a much-needed redesign of the FCO’s blogs.fco.gov.uk site. Unfortunately, the FCO’s platform did horrible things to the formatting, so even if it’s only to make it legible, I thought I’d echo one of the more controversial points I made in that comment.

    Specifically: my point that, for a project like that, the days of spending weeks and months honing wireframe diagrams and/or lengthy functional specifications should be behind us.

    A blog platform is no longer a start-from-scratch, blank-sheet-of-paper kind of project. Wipe away the surface layer, and there’s a very limited range of web page layouts these days. The functionality of a blog platform is even more standardised, with only a handful of serious candidates. Virtually all the functionality you’ll need will be ready, out of the box, within a matter of minutes.

    Having done this very regularly for several years now, I strongly believe that if you have a fairly good idea of the functionality you want, and a fairly good idea of the platform you like, you should look to force the two together at the earliest possible opportunity, rather than spending ages and £££ refining your wireframes and technical spec to perfection. Why waste time and money dreaming of what you might like, when you can have it in front of you within minutes, and know?

    It’s like when you buy a new car. Cars are a mature technology. They all feel a bit different, and come with slightly different features, but they all do broadly the same thing in the same way. If you want a new car, you don’t sit down and design your dream car. You don’t recruit your own team of engineers, designers and mechanics. You make a list of the few things that are important to you; then you go to the local showrooms and test-drive a few.

    In writing my comment for the FCO site, I went out of my way to avoid using the word WordPress. But my blog, my rules. So here’s the slightly less diplomatic version of what I wanted to say.

    • In a world of instant zero-cost availability, it’s ludicrous to consider functionality and platform in complete isolation from each other. It just is.
    • WordPress’s status as the world’s leading blogging platform is now, I’d suggest, undisputed. So if you want to run a multi-author blogging arrangement, it should be on WordPress. If you don’t believe me, maybe you could ask the Telegraph: they tried a bespoke platform, then tried a commercial product, then finally saw sense.
    • DFID are already running a multi-blogger platform, based on WordPress, and have been doing so most successfully for the last 15 months. It can do everything that you’d expect any such site to do – and more. It’s unquestionably a better system than the FCO’s. It ticks all the boxes on the FCO’s future wireframes; and if there’s anything it can’t already do, it can almost certainly be grafted on: that’s the beauty of WordPress. And we’ve proven that with them numerous times.
    • The DFID code is open source. Some of the key plugins are already available to the world on wordpress.org; I’m happy to explain and share any lower-level stuff within the templates.

    So…

    • If FCO come up with a reason why they can’t use the world-leading and lowest-cost solution, in conjunction with code already proven within government and also freely available, I sincerely look forward to hearing it. And I imagine Parliament will too.
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    Gloves for the iPhone generation

    gloves

    I’m heading off for a couple of days in Oslo next week; and I’m most grateful to Monday’s Gadget Show for reminding me of the problem of using a touchscreen phone in freezing conditions – namely, that you can’t touch the touchscreen through gloves. Thankfully they also suggested a solution: these North Face e-Tip gloves, which have silver woven into the index finger and thumb tips – and yes, they do indeed allow you to use a touchscreen.

    They’re decent ‘soft shell’ gloves, with sticky silicone bits on the palms – although the cyborg styling is maybe a bit much. I wouldn’t fancy them for typing on the on-screen keyboard, but for yer basic scrolling and stabbing – skimming over a Twitter feed or calling someone already in your contacts list – they’re fine. £22 from the North Face shop in Covent Garden. The weather forecast suggests it could be a good investment.

    I’m heading north to speak at this event organised by the Norwegian ministry of government affairs; I’ve been asked to talk about innovation in British politics and government, and will be sharing the platform with Håkon Wium Lie, who’s something of an online legend – MIT, Cern, W3C (where he invented CSS), now CTO at Opera. No pressure.

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    Microsites make perfect

    Steph Gray drew my attention to a piece highlighting the downside of microsites, and offered a nicely balanced view of the pros and cons. But whilst I admit to a commercial interest here, he missed one strong reason in favour of allowing at least the occasional microsite.

    I know it flies in the face of web rationalisation; but the only way to get better at building websites is to build websites.

    I’m unquestionably better at this job than I was when I started a couple of years ago. I learn something with every new project, and every fresh set of client requirements. I always consciously try to add something new and innovative – for me, or for government, or for WordPress – into every build. If it works, I’ll do it again next time; if not, I’ll certainly be wiser for trying.

    If you adhere to the ‘only one website per government department’ rule, that would mean your team is only building one website every 3-5 years, or maybe even more. No opportunity to practice or experiment in between monster projects; and the experience of ‘last time’ will, in all likelihood, be irrelevant. Any mistakes you make, you’ll be stuck with for the v-e-r-y long term.

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    BBC iPlayer back on Wii: a tipping point?

    iplayerwii

    The BBC’s new iPlayer ‘app’ for the Wii is now available for download: and it has the potential to do amazing things to UK viewing habits.

    Thus far, if you wanted to watch iPlayer via your Nintendo Wii (and your wireless broadband connection), there was a web-based interface, not dissimilar to iplayer/bigscreen – which was fine, but not without its issues. Like for example, if you wanted to watch full-screen – which, of course, you would – you had to do a manual zoom-in on the playback window, and even then, it wasn’t quite right. Then came the upgrade to the Wii’s web browser… and iPlayer broke, for some reason.

    Instead, there’s now a free iPlayer ‘channel’ available for download from the console’s Wii Shop. The interface is much the same: which, to be honest, is a bit disappointing. I can appreciate the desire to maintain consistency across all broadcast platforms, but the Wii could surely do a lot more than others. But it works fine, so no real complaints.

    The TV playback? Fantastic. Better image quality than before (I think): not as good as a Sky Digital signal, but certainly good enough. Seems more reliable playback too. And yes, hurrah, proper full-screen viewing.

    Of course, the Wii version falls a bit behind the Virgin Media cable version, which already boasts HD-quality. But it’s worth noting how big a success iPlayer has been on cable; Virgin credited its arrival as being ‘a real tipping point in consumer understanding of on-demand’. I wonder if the same can happen with the Wii (and other games consoles) as platforms for delivering online content?

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    Time marches on

    It’s been formally announced that BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) is to move its corporate website over to Sitecore by March next year. Of course, it’ll be a shame to see them moving away from WordPress for the ‘shop window’: but I can say with some certainty that there will still be plenty of WordPress-based activity after the move. 😉

    But that March launch date? As you may have noticed, there’s going to have to be a general election in the first half of next year. There are local elections scheduled for 6 May, making it the obvious date to pick for a national poll; although it could be as late as 3 June, and there have been rumours of a date as early as 25 March.

    Check your calendars, folks: we’re now into territory where the election date is a factor in even medium-sized web projects. The Cabinet Office’s election guidance isn’t specific about website redesigns, but the thrust of all their advice is to reduce communication activity to a bare minimum during the ‘purdah’ period immediately before polling day. So in the admittedly unlikely event of them calling the election for March, the BIS Sitecore site might have to be mothballed until after Election Day – even if it’s bang on schedule. And then you’re into awkward questions as to whether the behemothic BIS would survive in its current form. It might never see the light of day..?

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    BBC's Democracy Live site goes, er, live

    On the day the BBC launches its Democracy Live website comes news that MPs speaking in the Commons chamber are ‘to be discouraged’ from reading out text stored on an electronic device. No, seriously.

    But hey, back to Democracy Live. There’s a lot to like about it. The front page ‘video wall’ owes a lot to Sky Sports on a Champions League night, albeit without the drama. The ‘Your representatives’ databank (from Dod’s) is nice, with the ability to search by postcode – although it only gives you MPs, MSPs/AMs/MLAs and MEPs, not councillors; and it would be nice if there was an API onto the data too.

    The bit they’re clearly most excited about is the ability to search the video coverage by text – using ‘speech-to-text’ technology with a success rate ‘slightly higher’ than the industry standard. However the results, in my experience so far, have been disappointing: it seems pretty good at finding results, but it drops you in at the start of the debate (etc), not at the moment your word or phrase was mentioned.

    (Update: Ah, I see now. The search results’ main link is to the start of the clip; you have to click to expose the ‘deep links’ to the right place in the clip. Interface fail? Although actually, it takes you right to the very word: should probably start a few seconds earlier?)

    Oh yeah, and then there’s the whole embedding thing:

    At the moment, we do not have permission to enable the embedding of video from the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Discussions are continuing with officials at Westminster.

    If there’s one thing the Beeb have really cracked, it’s quality video streaming. So there’s no arguing with the site’s TV-esque aspect. But there’s nowhere near as much depth of coverage as on the official Parliament Live site, which includes video – live and recorded – of each committee. Besides, is video an efficient means of reviewing the proceedings of Parliament? I can read the Hansard transcript much faster than an MP can speak it.

    So whilst it’s a nice enough site in itself – and don’t get me wrong, it is a nice site – it doesn’t feel like it’s adding a tremendous amount, in qualitative terms, to what’s already out there. Yet. But a look at the source code suggests more exciting developments to come: there’s a lot of stuff ‘commented out’ or not yet enabled. Give it time.