Top ‘eCouncils’

From The Guardian‘s Online supplement:

Top eCouncils

Oldham Borough Council’s website is the best-performing local government site, according to automated testing by SiteMorse. The result is an average of tests based on the Web Accessibility Initiative, including responsiveness, error-free operation, HTML standards compliance and accessibility. Oldham attributes its success to Steria’s fine tuning of its website, following an analysis by the company’s Content Solutions Practice. Previously, Steria raised Spelthorne Council 297 places up the list in a similar exercise. The fastest downloading site is Scilly, while Chiltern has the fastest response time.

See here for more.

Will update with links to those Council websites later. No doubt our current one wouldn’t even deserve the wooden spoon…

New Look

You may or may not have noticed a new look for the site. The standard one that comes with WordPress is hardly inspiring, so a quick search of the WP Forums came up with Alex King‘s site.

On this page he ran a competition to see who could design the best template style for WordPress. This one, titled ‘Human Condition’ (for some reason!) came third, but it was the most suitable. It was designed by Ian Main.

Installation was very easy. Just upload the stylesheet file into the blog directory, along with the directory of images to go with it. Head into a browser, do a hard refresh and there it is. Perfect!

Now all I need to do is come up with a decent name for this thing. ‘Dave’s Blog’ is not good. When I have a name I can design a slightly snazzier graphic to go in the acre of blue space at the top of the page.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Reality Reading update

A Prayer for Owen Meany 58% [ 7 ]
The Great Gatsby 41% [ 5 ]
Alma Cogan 0% [ 0 ]
Status Anxiety 0% [ 0 ]
The Unfortunates 0% [ 0 ]

Total Votes : 12

It’s looking very much like a two-horse race at the moment. Good news because I fancied having a crack at APfOM anyway…honest!

Booker 2005 Controversy – Already

Interesting article on the Guardian Books site about comments made by John Sutherland, the Chairman of the 2005 Man Booker Prize Panel:

The newly announced chairman of the 2005 Man Booker prize has admitted that the judges are unlikely to read all 130 books in contention, while describing his fellow judges as “light on the minorities” and the process as like a “world federation wrestling match”.

John Sutherland, an emeritus professor of English at the University of London and a Guardian columnist, said: “It takes six or seven hours to read a novel, and a judge is being paid about £3,000. You don’t have to read the whole thing to know it doesn’t qualify.

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