Blogging

Guest post on DavePress

Things have been a little quiet on this blog of late – being on holiday didn’t help – but I guess I have just been rather busy doing stuff and haven’t had the chance to blog nearly as much as I would like.

So, I thought I would open the doors to the odd guest post from DavePress readers. I already have one ready to go later this week, but would like some more.

So, if you’d like to throw something together, along the lines of digital engagement and the public sector, do get in touch and we can see about getting it published. You’ll get the chance to be read by quite a few people in and around .gov.uk and beyond, so it might be a good opportunity to get some of your ideas in front of some new people.

I’ll give it a go for a few weeks – maybe one guest post a week? – and see if people find it useful.

Sarah Brown blog – No 10 team just does it

Sarah Brown G8 blog

Great work from the webbies at Number 10. Wanting a way to let Sarah Brown discuss some of the activities going on around the G8 summit, they produced a great quick-and-dirty solution by hosting a blog using the free WordPress.com platform.

It’s perfect for a time limited site like this, and what’s more they have managed to get it looking great too.

An awesome example of JFDI in action!

Catching up

Has it really been two weeks since I last posted here? Well, I’ve been busy, doing stuff. I promise.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the stuff I would normally have been writing about here during the whirlwind of the last fourteen days…

DIUS and BERR are no more, and will now be called BIS. BIS already has a corporate website set up, within days of the creation of the department, all thanks to WordPress. Steph explains how. Neil Williams also played a big part as the other half of the BIS digital dream team

A bit of work I have been doing with Neil at what was BERR and now BIS has been involved with the Digital Britain report, and some of the online engagement around the development of that. This included the live blogging at the Digital Britain Summit a little while ago, and now incorporates a whole host of online stuff to do with the launch of the report next week, as I wrote up on the DB blog.

Following the fun of the PSFBuzz event in Manchester, another one is now planned in Newcastle in July. Once again, it has a stella array of speakers, and as no one else has volunteered, I’ll be chairing again. All the details are on the PSF events page.

More PSF news comes in the form of the PSFBuzz Government Web 2.0 Awards, a gloriously bonkers idea to reward the best in interactive government web stuff at a ceremony in December this year. Sounds like it will be a lot of fun, not least because I’ll be among the judges!

Very sad news that Tom Watson has resigned from his position as Minister for (amongst other things) Digital Engagement. He pushed this agenda much further than any of his predecessors, perhaps because he was the first to truly understand the brief, and what was required. Am sure this will not be the last we hear from him, though, and I’m excited to find out what he will be doing next.

The fact that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is helping out on ‘public information delivery’ has got to be a good thing, though.

LocalGovCamp is now exactly a week away and to say that I am feeling excited about it is something of an understatement. We have a full house of delegates, a load of interesting ideas for sessions and now a gang of people are organising social events for the Friday and Saturday night. Thanks, guys.

Even more exciting is that fact that Google have offered to support the event, and will hopefully be sending some of their guys along to help out with some of the sessions which involve their stuff.

Finally, if you are interested in how press offices can incorporate social web stuff into what they do, Emma’s post is essential reading.

Citizen Engagement in Australia

Despina Babbage from the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development in the government of the state of Victoria in Australia emailed me this morning to let me know about her blog, which is all about citizen engagement.

It’s well worth subscribing to, as Despina does a great job of pulling together activity from all over the world – and it’s nice to hear from others what they think about what we are doing here in the UK, too!

DavePress redux

I’m currently having a good sort out of this blog – and will be relaunching it with quite a few changes in the near future.

I have found that running a self-hosted blog is a bit like running a PC, in that it gets clogged up with stuff that you install and then don’t use any more, you end up with files all over the place which aren’t very well managed, and then there is the look and feel of the thing, which I’ve never felt I have got just right.

You don’t need to worry about things going wobbly on the site though, as I am working on a local copy, running on my MacBook. This is through the joy of a brilliant little app called MAMP, which covers all the difficult stuff of getting Apache, PHP and MySQL running on the Mac.

With MAMP, all you have to do is download and install it, then start it up. It gives you instant and easy access to turning local servers on and off, creating and editing databases and all sorts. It really makes the whole process ridiculously easy.

For Windows users, there are equivalent apps like XAMPP, though not having used it I couldn’t vouch for how good it is!

So, for my local development of DavePress, I have locally installed a fresh WordPress 2.7.1, and then used the import function to pull in my posts and pages from the current version.

I did this rather than just import the whole database because there are tables in the current setup for plugins I no longer use, etc, and I want to keep things fresh where I can.

I’ve also installed the base theme I will be using, which will be Thesis, an extremely customisable theme which has had some great reviews from respected WordPress guys like Neville. I’ll be tweaking it to make it a bit more personal to me, and adding in plugins as I need them.

Another big job is to find all the images I have inserted into posts and make sure they are either a part of WordPress’ media manager or on Flickr. At the moment, files are all over the place: in different folders on the DavePress server, on Skitch, other image hosting services, on other websites where I have pinched them from… Having all photos on Flickr and other images inside my WordPress file structure will make managing my images and backing them up an awful lot easier.

Finally I want to take another look at the various static pages of content here – like About, Services, Resources etc – and give them a rewrite and make the whole site a bit more useful and professional.

This all means it may be a little while before I can relaunch this site, not least because it all has to be fitted round my proper work. Hopefully it will be worth it though!

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