Do councils need a website at all?

Simon Wakeman poses a potentially controversial question on his blog:

One idea that’s been playing on my mind for the past few days is whether a council needs a website at all.

Initially this might seem like complete heresy. Surely a public sector body providing services to local residents needs a website to help them communicate and provide online services to their residents?

But do they need a website in the sense that we might see a traditional “destination” website – a place where people go to find out information and do council stuff online?

One of the things that is making me challenge some assumptions is the increasing focus on place in local public services. For the uninitiated this means that there’s much less focus on the organisation providing particular local services (eg council, police, primary care trust…) and more on the organisations working together to provide services in a coherent way that suits residents and businesses, not service providers.

So why a council website alongside a police website alongside a primary care trust website?

He goes on to make some further really interesting points. Well worth a read.

I’m also thinking I need to add Simon to the Public Sector Bloggers list…

Akismet now has stats!

Akismet is a plugin for WordPress (and a few other platforms) which helps combat the problem of comment spam. That when ne’erdowells come on your blog and post nonsense comments in the hope pick click the links in them to buy some viagra, or invest in a Nigerian lottery winning syndicate.

Dealing with this stuff can be a pain.

(I have often wondered how people who run blogs or forums about the uses of bedroom-performance enhancing drugs, or genuine Nigerian investments, manage their spam. How do you decide what is and isn’t?)

Akismet makes it easy by checking your comments against a central database, which records what everyone who uses the system has marked as spam, and then removes it from view. So, no alerts telling you that you need to deal with a new comment – if Akismet thinks it’s spam, you don’t need to know about it.

You can still check the quarantined list for false-positives though, if you want. Sometimes the service works a little too well.

Anyhow, I upgraded the Akismet plugin today here on WordPress, and was surprised to see a new tab on my admin panel for ‘Akismet Stats’:

akismet stats

And once you click it, it makes pretty interesting reading! There are graphs and tables of data. Well worth the upgrade just to see what causes spikes in your comment spam.

Bookmarks for October 15th through October 16th

Stuff I have bookmarked for October 15th through October 16th:

5 Blogger tools for Mac

Whilst technically all you need is a blog and a browser to start blogging, there are some other bits of software you can use that make your life a little easier.

Here’s a list of options for Mac users:

1. Skitch

Easily my number one choice, this is a phenomenally useful tool, which I don’t think is available on any other platform.

Skitch is simply a tool that lets you take snapshots of what is on your screen. Sounds pretty unremarkable, but Skitch does some cool stuff:

  • It lets you copy just a small portion of the screen by selecting with a cross-hair
  • It lets you do some simple editing within the application, so you don’t have to load up a ‘proper’ graphics package
  • You can save your image by just dragging it onto the desktop
  • You can post it straight to your Flickr account, a skitch hosted page or your own web host via FTP with a click of a button

For getting image snapshots quickly onto the web, it’s brilliant. And free.

2. Transmit

Transmit is a solid, well performing Mac FTP client. Why use one? Well, if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, say, you need to upload plugins, themes and that kind of thing to your web host. And when it comes to upgrade time, having a solid FTP client is good for the blood pressure!

Transmit costs a few pennies, but is jolly reliable and so worth the investment.

3. NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is a desktop based RSS aggregator. I used this for a long while before being won over by the advantages of Google Reader. Others still swear by this though, especially now it has its own iPhone app.

4. MarsEdit

I rather bemoaned the state of the Mac desktop blogging client in a recent post, but since then I have been giving MarsEdit another go. The main issue for me is the lack of a rich text editor, which is good for speed but not awfully user friendly.

Again, it costs a couple of quid but is worth giving a go, especially if you use NetNewsWire with which it integrates rather well.

5. TextWrangler

Sometimes you just need to edit text, and don’t want to mess about. TextWrangler comes from the same people that make the legendary Mac text editor BBedit, which is rather pricey but feature rich. TextWrangler is BBedit’s freebie little brother, and let’s you load up text, html, php or css files and edit them to your heart’s content.

What are your favourite blogging tools? Would anyone like to see a Windows version of this list?

The first London Net Tuesday!

Amy Sample Ward has already arranged the first meeting of the London Net Tuesday group, which you can find out all about at Meetup.com. For the pathologically click-lazy, it’s on November 4th at the Charity Technology Trust.

Here’s the official announcement on NetSquared.

It looks like it is going to be a really fun event, with the focus of the first meet being blogging:

The 4 Nov. event topic is blogging. But not just some folks talking about blogging who already use it, or only want to talk about their own blog. This is going to be a bit more fun: we will have a select group ‘representing’ their preferred blogging platform go head-to-head over the capabilities, functionality, and general goodness of their chosen platform. This way we can hear the ins and outs of platforms in a way we may not usually experience. This discussion will be followed by a conversation with questions and answers about the various ways nonprofit organizations can introduce and utilize blogs to connect with communities.

A good time is guaranteed for all!

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