Not the most enticing of titles, possibly, but Stratford-on-Avon Council have launched a neat new service allowing people to easily look up when their bins should be collected (strikes permitting, of course) without the need for scanning long tables of towns, roads and dates. They announced it on their twitter feed.
You simple tell the system whereabouts in the district you live, and it tells you when your waste is collected. Easy.
Firstly, the stratford.gov.uk needs the www in front.
Secondly, needless use of javascript.
Close but no cookie.
Thanks for the www tip – have updated the link (why do some sites need it and others not?). Am guessing folk who have js turned off do so for security reasons? Or are there other accessibility issues?
Sites need the www in the name when they’ve not got the address of the domain set to their webserver, sometimes because they use the domain address for something else or usually they just aren’t aware that people will try it. (There used to be some problem with broken email servers getting confused and sending emails to the wrong place, but I hope they’ve all died by now.) You should always have one main address for your site and redirect others to it, to avoid double-indexing and so on. http://www.davepress.net redirects to davepress.net, for example.
I think the main reasons for not having Javascript enabled are 1. security (I’ve visited ac.uk sites which have noscript.net installed on all staff machines); 2. hatred of bits of webpages moving themselves around (although you can break things almost as badly with CSS in Firefox); 3. using something like a mobile phone that doesn’t understand javascript anyway but surely should be able to look up when the next bin day is; and 4. not wanting to waste electricity by wasting CPU on things like badly written text scrollers.
By the way, http://www.n-somerset.gov.uk also has needless use of javascript for its bin collection system. I think someone is selling similar broken crap to lots of councils. It’s e-planning all over again!
Finally, what’s loval governmet? (see tags 😉 )
Thanks for that, MJ, useful and interesting stuff.
Loval government? Why, it’s because I love all government, of course!
This App was actually built in house by our development team alongside myself as the Web Developer for the front end.
Your point regarding the javascript is a good one, and we’ll look at a alternative for users who have it switched off.
For almost all new apps, we have a non-javascript version. As we’re using Google Maps more, we’re starting to replace the ‘moveable’ maps, with the Static Maps API (albeit slightly restricted) where users are without javascript.
cheers for the comments as usual!
Simon
Simon, thanks for stopping by and commenting! It’s really great what you guys are up to in Stratford.
No worries, it’s nice to know our work isn’t going un-noticed.
The bin collections pages have been really successful since we launched about 10 days ago. About 4,000 page views already.
The biggest challenge is getting residents involved, especially with things like Twitter.
But, it’s still in its infancy, and over the next few months we’ll have more tight integration with other API tools to make our public engagement with our website a more pleasant experience!
A long want list…. just trying to roll it all out!