Health, Police, Fire and More!

Yep, a stackload of more sites have been added to LGSearch, making it a very useful thing indeed. The sites added come under the labels:

  • Police and Fire
  • Health
  • LG Related

And as with the Councils and Central Government sites, you can specify which ones you want to appear in your search.

As always the list of sites is on the wiki. Please check for yours and let me know any corrections, or any I have missed.

Central Government added to LGSearch

The first major update has been made to LGSearch, the now-inaccurately described local government search engine.

The sites for central government departments have now been added. You can find a list of the sites included on the LGSearch project page on the wiki.

You can still just search for local government stuff though, if you want to. When you run your search, you’ll notice a couple of extra links at the top of the page:

refining LGSearches

Just click which type of sites are the ones you want to appear, and hey presto!

Soon I’ll get round to added police, health and fire authorities too.

Updates

I’ve changed things around quite a bit on this blog, partly in an attempt to force myself to update it a little more often.

I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, 2.1, which does various things in a much nicer way for me, though readers don’t get a great deal more out of it. I’ve put a new theme in place to make the site look a bit nicer, and installed some quite cool plugins which add some extra functionality.

At some point I’ll do a post on setting up a WordPress blog, with information on what all of this stuff does.

I have killed LGKnowledge for now – the open source project behind the platform I was using seems to have stalled. I’ll keep my eye on it, because I think this could be a really useful tool in the future, once the spamming problems are sorted out.

In the interests of saving diskspace, I’ve also deleted the forum on here. I was never going to have the time to really make it work well, and there is never anything more depressing on a site than to see a forum with no posts in it! So, I will concentrate my efforts on this blog and LGSearch. I’ll keep the wiki in place as it’s a useful way of storing documentation.

RSS habits

From Google Reader’s trends feature:

From your 238 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,827 items, starred 0 items, and shared 56 items

And I had the weekend off entirely…

I try to remember to share the stuff I find interesting.

England 0 – 1 Spain

When, oh when, will Steve McClaren, or whoever else is managing England, learn?

Square pegs, round holes. Square pegs, round holes. Square pegs, ro… you get the picture.

Picking Ben Foster and Jonathan Woodgate was good.

Picking Phil Neville at left back was very bad – we know he can’t cut it in that position (or, probably, any position) at this level. Was there no U21 left back who could have been brought in for some experience? Why bother picking older players to play out of position in internatial friendlies? What’s the point?

The midfield of Wright-Phillips, Gerrard, Carrick and Lampard was absurd. Pundits bag on about having Lampard and Gerrard in the same team, and whether or not it is possible. Of course it is, and McClaren has proved it himself – you play Lampard in the middle and Gerrard on the right. Stick a holding midfielder next to Lampard and then choose a left sided player to, guess what? Play on the left hand side.

What on earth was the point in asking Lampard to play on the left? We knew he couldn’t do it before the game, and we were proved right. Barry should have started from the off, because that’s his position – it’s what he does!

The problem for the England midfield is lack of consistency. The players should know what their role is in the team. The first choice midfield is fairly obvious: Gerrard on the right, Lampard and Hargreaves in the centre, Joe Cole on the left.

Now, if any of these players are unavailable, then replacements, who can play in that position, should be brought in. The others should stay in their regular role. If Gerrard can’t play, then Lennon should, or Wright-Phillips. If Cole doesn’t play, then Downing or Barry should step up. Hargreaves can be replaced by Carrick or Parker. Lampard is the only problem here – if he can’t play, and I don’t think Jenas, Barton or Dyer are good enough, then Gerrard should probably come across and then Lennon or whoever brought in on the right.

But this insistence of selecting players out of position – especially in matches designed for giving experience to younger players – can’t continue if England are to be anything other than a dull, distinctively average side.

CSS Irritation

The theme I am using on this site at the moment, Fjords01!, is beatiful. But for some reason the CSS makes italics (through the em tag) appear like this.

Until I get round to changing the stylesheet, I am having to edit the tags to be a simple ‘i’. It’s annoying.

[tags] fjords01! theme[/tags]

Why I still read newspapers

Despite being an avid reader of RSS feeds – not just from blogs, but other sites like newspapers, and other new organisations – I still get a newspaper every day. I guess this runs somewhat contrary to the idea that the use of web technology to deliver news will eventually mean the death of the printed press.

So why do I still buy newspapers, when all the content I am interested in is available free online?

Well, there is the obvious thing about how nice it is to have a newspaper in your hands, sticky ink and all. But for me, the main thing is that having the paper in front of me makes me read stuff that I’m not necessarily interested in.

One of the main things on here is the business news. It’s actually quite interesting, who is buying who and what’s going on in the stock markets and stuff. I don’t really understand it, but it’s still good reading. Now, if I am reading a newspaper online, I wouldn’t go near the business section, because it isn’t one of my main interests.

Charlie Brooker on Macs

Charlie Brooker, TV reviewing god, has a pop at the ‘I’m a Mac’ ad campaign with his usual savagery:

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign – the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show – probably the best sitcom of the past five years – in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

Genius.