Personal Democracy Forum

Interesting article on TechCrunch about the Personal Democracy Forum taking place in New York next week:

It’s also time for more industry leaders to push politicians to take a more forward-thinking approach to how government distributes public information. We hear a lot these days about how the internet is affecting the election, which PdF will cover from every conceivable angle, but in some ways it’s far more important to look at how we can start rethinking how government works, and how it can more effectively connect with American citizens to help solve problems. PdF is expanding to two days this year to devote a whole day to this issue, and my guess is that come 2009, we’re going to have an administration (either Obama or McCain) that is more open to trying to use the tools of the social web-blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing, etc-to open up governance.

More evidence of the increasing overlap between the tech communities and the eGovernment/eDemocracy crowds – something that has recently been discussed on the UKGovWeb list as we plan another Barcamp-style event.

WordPressers – make your URLs readable!

I’ve noticed that quite a few folk who have installed their own version of WordPress (as opposed to those that use WordPress.com) haven’t got round to making the URLs (the bit that appears in the address bar of a browser) of their posts ‘human readable’.

In other words, they look like http://www.myblog.com/?p=1027 rather than http://www.myblog.com/postsubject.

Why would you want to make your links appear in this way?

  1. It helps in search engine optimisation – if the link says something about the content, Google etc like it
  2. It makes it easier for people to know what they are getting before they follow a link to your site
  3. It probably helps accesibility-wise
  4. IT JUST LOOKS NICER!

That’s enough reasons. Anyway, if you are a WordPress user, changing the way your post URLs – or ‘permalinks’ as they are known – is pretty easy. All the options are in the control panel, just click Settings then Permalinks and choose an option from:

  • Default: http://davepress.net/?p=123
  • Day and name: http://davepress.net/2008/06/17/sample-post/
  • Month and name: http://davepress.net/2008/06/sample-post/
  • Numeric: http://davepress.net/archives/123

I use the second option, day and name. Once you have made your choice, just hit Save. That should be it.

The only complication because of the way a file is setup on your server, called .htaccess. For WordPress to make the changes to your post URLs, it needs access to write to this file. If it, can’t, it will provide you with the code you need to paste into your .htaccess file to get it all to work. Don’t worry, this is pretty simple and you should be able to do it within your web host’s control panel.

Another thing not to worry about are all those links out there on the web linking to your old, number based, post URLs – these will still work!

Local government on Twitter!

I’m delighted to note that Stratford-on-Avon District Council has its own account on Twitter. What is even better is that they display the badge on their homepage!

This is just the sort of intiative that we’re looking for in various places, like the Social Media CoP, for example. Fine, there are arguments about Twitter, in terms of how many folk actually use it, its notorious flakiness, etc etc… but sometime you just have to give things a go. And it’s great that someone in local government is doing just that.

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