Puffbox

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

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    WordPress meets Twitter

    As if I needed another reason to love WordPress, along comes their new Prologue theme which effectively gives you your own local version of Twitter. That’s not to say it’s a competitor to Twitter: the whole beauty of Twitter is that everyone is using the same platform (with occasionally unfortunate consequences). But as a team collaboration tool, particularly on anything requiring a bit more privacy, this is potentially brilliant.

    And yet, it’s so obvious. The ‘tweets’ are just very short blog posts. Author archiving, tagging, commenting, permalinking and RSS functionality is all built-in anyway. All it needed was the integration of a ‘write new post’ box into the display template – plus the stroke of genius to actually do it. Now all we need is an events calendar (maybe using the same ‘input box on the output screen’ concept), and WordPress takes over the world.

    (If you want to use it on a local installation, you can get the files from Subversion. And you know what? Looking at the underlying PHP code, it’s depressingly straightforward. ๐Ÿ™‚ )

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    Thoughts from Barcamp: just do it

    The mere fact that Saturday’s BarcampUKGovWeb happened at all would have been enough in itself; but the assembled group of influential, inspirational and interesting people made for a fantastic day. At one point in the afternoon, I remember looking at the schedule and getting depressed at the countless interesting sessions I’d missed. It’s been a long time since I thought that of a (more conventional) conference. But I left with a slightly empty feeling: lots of questions, some of them very deep indeed, but no simple answers, and very few ‘action points’.

    The best lesson I can draw from the day’s proceedings is this: Just Do It. The day itself was proof. We all arrived with a common purpose, but no specific agenda. The framework was set in advance, and proceeded to fill itself. We all got stuck in, and it just worked.

    You’ve got Steve Dale’s example of just getting a Drupal installation into place, within a fortnight, to shock the client into a response. Or the MySociety approach of accepting ‘The System’ can’t or won’t deliver, and just getting on with it. Or my own WordPress-based crusade, I suppose. How to decide if Twitter or Seesmic has a role in government? – start using it, and let’s see.

    Since Saturday, I’ve heard of one person who’s started a blog, and one person who’s decided to get to grips with Facebook. Dave’s (relatively simple) Pageflakes example has drawn some interest. I wonder how many had ever edited a wiki before signing up for the event? These are all baby steps, but they are the only way people will get the big picture. (Welcome aboard, guys.)

    I firmly believe ‘the shift’ has happened, and government risks being left (even further) behind unless it exposes itself to the new world out there. COI’s Transformation / Rationalisation isn’t a bad thing in itself: the worst excesses needed to be reined in. But if we can agree what not to do, can we start agreeing what we can or should do?

    Let’s start small: a Directgov/COI blog, please. Then maybe a WordPress (MU?)-based blogging platform for Civil Service uses (like Microsoft did). A tie-up with Basecamp or London-based Huddle, to encourage lightweight project management methods. But the best idea of the day came (I think) from Graham from DIUS: a parallel version of Directgov in wiki form, allowing external experts to suggest improvements which might improve the ‘real’ version. Sheer genius. Let’s just do it.

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    HTML email coming to Blackberry

    I’m not a huge fan of email generally; it usually means ‘work’, as Mr Briggs noted following Barcamp, and I’ve argued about previously. In my mind, spam has discredited email as a marketing mechanism. But a lot of large corporate clients still think in email terms, and it isn’t going away any time soon.

    So it’s with some relief that I note, among the list of improvements planned for the Blackberry platform in 2008, is:

    ‘HTML and Rich Text Email Rendering โ€“ BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting.’

    If you’ve never used or worked with Blackberry, you’ll be shocked at just how badly it handles HTML email (as I described in an article for BT last year). So on the face of it, this sounds like good news, and will be widely welcomed – although naturally we’ll have to see how it pans out.

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    Breath of fresh AIR

    I’m finding more and more reasons to like Adobe’s new AIR technology. They describe it as ‘a new technology that makes possible exciting new software applications that merge the desktop and the web’; in practice, it opens software development up to those who chose to specialise in more ‘creative’ fields like Flash. And of course, because it’s AIR, the same app runs on both Windows and Mac (with Linux supportย  to follow).

    Two current favourite tools: Analytics Reporting Suite, for looking at your Google Analytics data; and Twhirl, a lovely little Twitter app. In both cases, the originating website was already perfectly usable, but the convenience of a desktop app takes it a step further.

    The Analytics tool is a reminder of the web’s limitations, even in the post-Ajax world: it’s just quicker, neater, and arguably prettier. And there are countless reasons to like Twhirl: you can log into several accounts at once; the interface removes the need to remember all those ugly Twitter codes; and there are ‘toaster’ alerts when a friend sends an update. Both are highly recommended… and free, obviously.

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    Meet the new Puffbox site

    Everything seems to have rolled over successfully, so I think I’m now safe to talk about the new Puffbox.com site.

    The majority of Puffbox’s work since launching in April 2007 has been based around WordPress. I make no secret of my feelings for the product; so it was only natural that, at some point, I’d want to take control of my own affairs and build a self-hosted WordPress site from scratch.

    I found plenty of excuses not to abandon my long-established WordPress.com blog, but in the end, two milestones forced my hand: passing 50,000 page views, and Jeremy Gould‘s announcement of tomorrow’s UK Government Barcamp. As ever, a fixed date in the calendar soon focused the mind.

    An immediate question arose: which was more important, the blog or the company background? In the end, the blog won on points. For me anyway, the blog’s (almost) daily stream of news and opinions is the best indication of what I’m about. But the site still needed a solid corporate side, otherwise it was going to look like an amateur blogger in search of pocket money. Hence the split homepage, with a clear colour distinction between ‘company’ (white) and ‘personal’ (green).

    I designed it in collaboration with Jonathan Harris, a former colleague at National Statistics, now working freelance; he’s also done another piece of work with me, which we’ll unveil next week. All the templates were coded from scratch, although I took some inspiration from the Hemingway WordPress theme(s): particularly as regards the very vertical presentation, with the sidebar becoming a footer. Icons come from the Milk and Green set. The homepage ‘grid’ layout of recent posts is done using multiple WordPress loops, a technique I’ve had to perfect for several recent client projects.

    I’ve learned a few lessons in building the site, but most important of all is that you should always redirect your main RSS feed through Feedburner from day one. What a relief it was to flick the switch from old site to new, and see the subscriber base carry over (almost) seamlessly. The Feedburner stats are nice to have, but they are nothing compared to the convenience of having a perma-URL for your feed. Now it’s all free, there’s no excuse not to.

    And by public demand, there’s now also a link for the comments feed. Of course, being WordPress, the feed was already there if you knew where to look. But in honour of Alan in Belfast, first to comment on the new site, I added an explicit link – and named it after him. ๐Ÿ™‚

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    Panic over

    Well, that’s a relief. With Peter Hain resigning at lunchtime, there was a rush of quite rational speculation that the Wales Office might be folded into a new ‘department for the devolved bits’, covering Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

    I’ve been doing a bit of work for the Wales Office over the last month or so, which I’ll (hopefully?) be unveiling at Saturday’s government BarCamp. I’m exceptionally proud of it, and I think it’s a potentially groundbreaking piece of work for e-government. But if Downing Street had announced the end of the Wales Office as a department in its own right, the whole point of my project would have disappeared. And for a moment this afternoon, it looked like my masterpiece might never see the light of day.

    Paul Murphy, I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear of your appointment. I note he’ll also be chairing a ‘new cross-departmental committee on IT and information security – although the grammar of the No10 announcement doesn’t make clear if it means IT generally, or IT security specifically.

  • New Puffbox.com site now live

    Thanks for coming. Now go away.

    As announced here a few weeks ago, I’ve taken the brave decision to leave behind my WordPress.com-based blog of two years standing, in favour of a self-hosted solution under my company Puffbox’s brand. It makes sense for all sorts of reasons I won’t list here. If you want to keep receiving my regular rants and reflections, you’ll now need to visit the all-new puffbox.com instead.

    If you’re signed up to the RSS feed, and you’re in the majority who changed their settings as instructed, you shouldn’t now have to do anything. If you didn’t, shame on you. Hurry up.

    I’m planning on leaving this site ‘live’ as an archive; in time, I may migrate all the old stuff over to the new site, but I’m reluctant to do so in these early stages, in case it’s seen as a ‘splog‘.

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    The Mirror should be ashamed

    Maguire blog misses HainI’m sitting here at 6pm on a huge day in politics. A political heavyweight has unexpectedly resigned, freeing up two seats at the Cabinet table. We’ve got all the usual fun and games of the ensuing reshuffle – who’s up, who’s down, who’s been snubbed – and widespread speculation about a merger of several government departments, with an impact on the Ministry of Defence. It’s Gordon Brown’s first resignation, and there’s a good argument to say this is the blogosphere’s first scalp. It doesn’t really get any bigger.

    Over at the Mirror’s ‘Kevin Maguire & Friends‘ blog? Nothing all day. Not a peep, from Kevin or indeed his friends. My advice to the Mirror: kill the site now. If you can’t make it work today, you never will. Shameful.

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    Three-second kettle: best gadget ever

    Three second kettleI am in awe of the latest gadget to appear in our house: the new Tefal QuickCup ‘kettle’. I don’t pretend to understand how it works; something to do with spirals. All I care about is: you fill it with cold water, you press the red button on top, and within three seconds it starts spitting out hot water at a coffee-friendly 85ยฐC. There’s a built-in water filter, too.

    Even better, it can apparently ‘save up to 65% energy’ compared to a normal kettle… so it’s environmentally sound too! Granted, it’s a bit noisy, and it sprays a bit if you don’t put the mug relatively close up to the spout – but worst case scenario, it’s noisy and spitty for three seconds. I think I can put up with that.

    This totally redefines the process of making a cup of instant coffee, and my world is hereby changed for ever. Unfortunately, the inevitable result will be a dramatic increase in my caffeine intake. Amazon has them for less than ยฃ50. Coffee on demand, with a green conscience? For fifty quid? Come on, people. It don’t get much better.

  • Whitehall staff have no life

    MySociety’s new travel-time maps are a fine piece of data visualisation / mashing, and a sociological warning.

    In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert D Putnam concluded that ‘every ten minutes of commuting reduces all forms of social capital by 10%’. By which calculation, if you live more than 50 minutes’ travel from your workplace, your involvement in your community and society reduces to – er – zero.

    Meanwhile, the latest data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders shows first-time buyers are typically having to borrow 3.3x their income. And National Statistics data puts the median gross salary of a civil servant at ‘approximately ยฃ20,000 on an FTE basis’ (Sept 2006, see PDF).

    Put those numbers together with the MySociety maps, and the picture is pretty bleak: Whitehall staff on all but the highest salaries can’t expect to live anywhere near their work, and hence can’t expect to have any kind of a social (capital) life. We end up with a central government bureaucracy ever further distanced from the citizenry it’s trying to service. Or am I stretching things too far?