If anyone with interest in the stuff I post here is coming to Manchester for the Labour Party conference and fancies meeting up for a drink – I live near the conference centre and am always happy to have a chat about stuff.
I have no idea how to respond to a plug for TGS that reads like this…
The thing in TGS that I’ve been working on for the last week or so is http://travel.thegovernmentsays.com – travel advice.
The FCO does a wonderful job of updating its travel advice for every country in the world on a regularly (daily in some cases) basis. Unfortunately, they provide only very limited mechanisms for pushing updates. Checking the website is great when you want to know what the advice is. When it changes, sometimes you want to know right now without constantly hitting refresh (which would really interfere with your holiday).
As a result, if you request an email alert for travel advice, it will send you an alert whenever we see the advice has changed, which is possibly a number of times a day. The FCO website is checked for updates every 20 minutes.
I’ve also put live the regional versions of TGS. See the top of www.thegovernmentsays.com for details. The regional (and other nations) coverage is a mixture of localised versions of national press releases, and also releases which only affect a localised area.
Have fun.
After spending most of the morning fighting with the remaining new extensions to TGS, they’re finally done. Now, we just need our design guru to send me the changes in a way which don’t suck. You can always tell the bits of design that I do, and the bits that someone else does – my bits look ugly.
Once that’s done, I’ll probably throw open a competition to do the designs for the logo at the top of the regional sites. At the moment, it’s just the bog standard TGS logo, but there should be scope for doing fun stuff – adding a dragon to Wales; a bottle of whiskey to Scotland etc.
I also found out where all the TGS traffic of the last few days has come from. It was mentioned in a sidebar in last Sunday’s Observer newspapper, and a large range of organisations have picked up on it. I especially like their comment
Something you can play with now is an addition to mptables.com which I thought would take ages but ended up taking about 15 minutes. MPTables includes a (small) number of data sources, but it would be good for people to be able to include their own data on constituencies and match it against ours. Especially for testing purposes before offering it for inclusion, but more generally as well. Now you can.
So I’ve taken a few days off my day job to spend some time cracking on with various projects I’ve been thinking or talking about for the last few months. The first thing to do was to update the config files which control all of the TGS feeds. Most of these are automated, but each config file requires the URL of the relevant department adding. Many of them are easy to guess, most are the top hit on google, but just enough aren’t that the failure rate of automation was too high. So it got stuck for a while until after the move to the mysociety servers.
One of the advantages of that move, besides the immediate results in terms of increased content, has been the increased volume of traffic that we’ve been getting.
Some of those are now available if you know where to look, some are being finalised and tested in that window just there —-> (assuming the FCO website stays up long enough for the script to ever finish).
Anyway, will hopefully be a busy few days.
Should be fun.
Disruptive Proactivity