Thursday, 15 January, 2026

Recategorising over 3,000 blog posts

I have been frustrated with the state of the categories on this blog for some years now. That’s right – years. This site has been going in one form or another for over 20 years – the first post being in 2004 – and there’re over 3,000 posts on here in total.

Over that time, category use in WordPress has been variable. This has resulted in a morass of categories, which I am never quite sure which to choose when posting.

So, I wanted to find a way to recategorise everything in a reasonably efficient way, and thought with a mix of Google’s Gemini LLM tool and some choice WordPress plugins, I might be able to get it done.

Delete the old categories

First step – after backing everything up of course – was to remove all the categories I am currently using (there were hundreds). To do this I used the free WP Bulk Delete plugin, which was very easy. I then deactivated and uninstalled the plugin to keep things neat.

Export post data

Next, I used the free version of WP All Export to produce a CSV file of every post (the post ID, title, and content) on the blog. That done, again the plugin was deactivated and uninstalled.

Define the new categories

Now I needed to come up with a set of categories to cover the content in the blog. Being lazy, I decided to ask Gemini to do it for me. Here’s the prompt, which I got to after a bit of back and forth with Gemini:

**Role:** You are an expert WordPress Archivist and Data Taxonomist.

**Context:** I have uploaded a CSV containing 3,031 blog posts from a 20-year archive. The current categorization is a mess. I need to completely restructure the site content into a clean, modern, and mutually exclusive taxonomy.

**Goal:** We need to assign one single, perfect category to every post in this CSV so I can import it back into WordPress.

—

1. Scan the “Title” and “Content/Excerpt” columns of the uploaded CSV to understand the breadth of topics covered over the last 20 years.

2. Propose a list of **12-15 high-level categories**.
– These must be mutually exclusive (no overlap).
– They must be comprehensive (cover all topics in the file).
– Use simple, standard naming conventions (e.g., “Technology,” “Travel,” “Personal,” not “My Cool Tech Stuff”).

3. Output this proposed list to me with a brief explanation of what belongs in each.

This produced 12 suggested categories, which seemed fine to me.

  • Digital Government

    Content: Public sector digital transformation, local government (councils), civic tech, and policy discussions.

  • Social Media & Community

    Content: Analysis of platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), online community management, and social networking trends.

  • Technology & Software

    Content: General tech news, software reviews (e.g., Zoho, Gmail), hardware, and internet tools.

  • Web & WordPress

    Content: Web design, development, specific WordPress plugins/themes, and CMS discussions.

  • Blogging & Content

    Content: The practice of blogging, writing, online journalism, and digital media trends.

  • Open Data & Transparency

    Content: Open government data, freedom of information, transparency, and data standards (“Mash the State”).

  • Productivity & Work

    Content: Workflow tips, remote work, collaboration tools, and personal effectiveness.

  • Events & Speaking

    Content: Conference write-ups, presentation slides, workshops, and event announcements.

  • Links

    Content: Your archive contains hundreds of “Links for [Date]” and “Bookmarks” posts. These are distinct resources and deserve their own home.

  • Daily Notes

    Content: Short, micro-blog style updates, status messages, and quick thoughts (e.g., “Five for Friday”).

  • Reviews

    Content: Specific reviews of books, products, or services that don’t fit strictly into “Technology.”

  • Personal

    Content: Life updates, off-topic reflections (e.g., “Woken by a cat”), and general musings.

Match posts to new categories

Now I needed to match each of my 3,000+ posts with one of these 12 categories and list them in a CSV file.

Gemini suggested a Python script, so I fired up a terminal window and ran this script:

import pandas as pd

# 1. Load your CSV
# Make sure the filename matches your export exactly
df = pd.read_csv(‘Posts-Export-2026-January-15-1048.csv’)

# 2. Define the Categories and Keywords
categories = {
“Curated Links”: {
“keywords”: [“links for”, “bookmarks”, “reading list”, “worth reading”, “link dump”, “daily links”],
“weight”: 10
},
“Digital Government”: {
“keywords”: [“council”, “localgov”, “gov”, “civic”, “policy”, “public sector”, “democracy”, “e-gov”, “citizen”, “government”, “public service”, “whitehall”, “civil service”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Social Media & Community”: {
“keywords”: [“twitter”, “facebook”, “social media”, “community”, “network”, “platform”, “linkedin”, “instagram”, “social network”, “online community”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Web & WordPress”: {
“keywords”: [“wordpress”, “plugin”, “theme”, “css”, “html”, “web design”, “cms”, “blog engine”, “php”, “javascript”, “code”, “developer”, “site”, “website”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Technology & Software”: {
“keywords”: [“google”, “apple”, “software”, “app”, “iphone”, “mac”, “tech”, “tool”, “hardware”, “zoho”, “gmail”, “browser”, “firefox”, “chrome”, “device”, “mobile”, “internet”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Open Data & Transparency”: {
“keywords”: [“open data”, “foi”, “transparency”, “mashup”, “dataset”, “freedom of information”, “data”, “ckan”, “statistics”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Productivity & Work”: {
“keywords”: [“productivity”, “work”, “gtd”, “email”, “inbox”, “office”, “remote”, “collaboration”, “workflow”, “management”, “meeting”, “career”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Events & Speaking”: {
“keywords”: [“conference”, “camp”, “barcamp”, “presentation”, “slides”, “event”, “talk”, “session”, “meetup”, “workshop”, “govcamp”, “speaking”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Blogging & Content”: {
“keywords”: [“blogging”, “writing”, “journalism”, “media”, “post”, “content”, “publish”, “blogger”, “feed”, “rss”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Reviews”: {
“keywords”: [“review”, “book review”, “product review”, “thoughts on”, “impression”],
“weight”: 2
},
“Daily Notes”: {
“keywords”: [“five for friday”, “update”, “status”, “note”, “snippet”, “aside”, “quick update”],
“weight”: 1
},
“Personal”: {
“keywords”: [“holiday”, “cat”, “home”, “life”, “family”, “personal”, “thoughts”, “rant”, “weekend”, “music”, “film”],
“weight”: 1
}
}

def categorize_post(row):
title = str(row[‘Title’]).lower()
content = str(row[‘Content’]).lower()

# Priority Rule: Curated Links
if any(k in title for k in categories[“Curated Links”][“keywords”]):
return “Curated Links”

# Priority Rule: Daily Notes (Short content check)
if len(content) < 200 and "href" not in content and len(title) < 30: return "Daily Notes" # Scoring Logic scores = {cat: 0 for cat in categories} def score_text(text, multiplier=1): for cat, data in categories.items(): for keyword in data['keywords']: if keyword in text: scores[cat] += (1 * multiplier * data.get('weight', 1)) # Title gets 3x weight score_text(title, multiplier=3) # Check first 1000 chars of content score_text(content[:1000], multiplier=1) best_cat = max(scores, key=scores.get) if scores[best_cat] == 0: return "Personal" return best_cat # 3. Apply the function df['New_Category'] = df.apply(categorize_post, axis=1) # 4. Save the result output_filename = 'Categorized_Posts_Archive.csv' df[['id', 'New_Category']].to_csv(output_filename, index=False) print(f"Success! File saved as: {output_filename}")

This worked as expected and spat out a new CSV file listing post ids next to the new category.

Apply new categories to posts in WordPress

Now I needed to get WordPress to look at this CSV file and update the content database so that each post is assigned to the right new category. To do that I used WP All Import, which I paid for – although I’m not sure I actually needed to.

This stage of the process was the most frustrating as WP All Import is necessarily quite fiddly, and it took about 5 goes to get it to do what I wanted. But I got there in the end.

The result

Well, in a sense, success! In the space of less than an hour I have recategorised over 3,000 posts on my blog into just 12 different categories.

On the other hand… it turns out I hate these categories and the ways Gemini associated them with posts is often really stupid.

The learning

Using Gemini made this possible. On my own, I couldn’t have done it. This is 100% true of the Python scripting, which I have zero knowledge of, but also it would have taken me ages to figure out the steps I needed to take (am sure they seem obvious to others!).

However, I will inevitably redo the process, with categories and definitions I have produced myself, to try and get better results.

For now, though, it’ll do.

#Recategorising over 3,000 blog posts

Some major reworking of this blog over the last few days. Dramatically simplified things – sadly the micropost format that Steph helped me build didn’t make the cut.

Instead I am making use of the default WordPress ‘asides’ post format to add what used to be microposts. This has helped me cut down the number of plugins running on the site significantly.

Also, I removed Google Analytics because I never looked at it, and don’t really care how many people read this anyway.

I also replaced the theme, switching from GeneratePress to Blocksy – which I know is a bit bloated but which I understand and can oo things with.

I’ve added a bit to the About page to describe how the blog works, plugins and custom code used, and so on, if you are sufficiently interested to look.

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Wednesday, 14 January, 2026

Roger Swannell – Getting agile governance right:

In a traditional waterfall or stage-gated development process quality assurance and approval checks happen towards the end of the work. It makes sense if you’re optimising for efficiency as all the quality check governance happens when the development is as close to it’s live and finished state as possible. But it’s based on the assumption that it’s possible to know ahead of the development work all the possible considerations and implications, which approval checks can refer to and confirm met or not.

The agile perspective is that its not possible to know all those implications ahead of doing the development work and so the better approach is to get smaller feedback more regularly and respond to it more quickly. This is better than waiting until near the end because changes are easier to make whilst development work is in progress. This approach optimises for effectiveness where getting it right is more important than doing it quickly.

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Wise words as always from Catherine Howe – Change is a layered thing:

There is an alchemy to taking stuff you have already and turning it into something different but I think that’s the essence of organisational change. You are always working with the fabric and nature of the organisation as it is in order to help it become something renewed.

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Monday, 12 January, 2026

Friday, 9 January, 2026

Wednesday, 7 January, 2026

Nina Belk, dxw – Improving the transition from policy to delivery with service patterns:

‘Service patterns’ are reusable building blocks that help teams to design services end-to-end and front-to-back, in a coherent and consistent way, making them easier to deliver and use. They are created by analysing existing services and abstracting the common steps and elements that make up those services into building blocks that others can use as a starting point for designing new services.

#

AI is not a strategy

AI is not a strategy, it’s a tactic. Once all the fuss has settled down, we will be in a position where specific AI tools are useful in specific circumstances – it won’t have “transformed” anything.

We had exactly this conversation about robotic process automation a few years back. And before that, cloud. And before that, CRM. And before that, I dunno, Lotus Notes.

I’m not saying that (what we are currently calling) AI isn’t useful – it is, and it will be. But it isn’t going to change everything. It’s just a technology.

When you hear people making wild claims about AI, try not to get caught up in it. Remember – if something sounds like a silver bullet, it isn’t one.

#AI is not a strategy

Tuesday, 6 January, 2026

Catherine Howe – We need new feedback loops:

If we want to think differently together then we need to create new feedback loops and the chance to gain confidence in new approaches. Many of the professional networks that we have grown up with are reinforcing old behaviours, this is a chance to change that.

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Monday, 5 January, 2026

Tuesday, 2 December, 2025

📅 Daily Note: December 2, 2025

Gavin Beckett – Harnessing the changing landscape of local government to create internet era organisations:

Effective responses to complex, long-standing social challenges need to be co-designed and co-produced with people and community organisations that grow from the ground up. Modern councils need new capabilities that enable them to work well with a constellation of partners, thinking about the network’s ability to create teams and services that wrap around the person and family, rather than assuming that the council must create top-down solutions themselves. They need to be effective conveners, brokers and collaborators in the ecosystem of the whole place.

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Atika writes One Year On: Building Digital Momentum in Luton:

Twelve months ago, I stepped into the Director of Digital, Data and Technology role with a clear set of ambitions and a determination to help Luton Council move forward on its digital journey. Looking back, the transformation has been both challenging and rewarding—and, most importantly, it’s been a team effort.

Working with her has been great!

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Paul Brown – Everything I Got Wrong About Product (So You Don’t Have To)

That’s when it hit me: the lessons I’d want my son to know are the same lessons I wish someone had told me — the ones that stop you wasting years pretending you know the future, chasing the wrong goals, or mistaking movement for progress.

(via Neilly Neil)

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Nice story on the LOTI blog about adapting open source components in the Drupal system to make an AI-powered PDF scraper to help create more accessible HTML content on council websites.

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Another one from the LOTI blog, this time it’s Rethinking how councils buy technology by Katy Beale:

Procurement isn’t just a list of features. It’s about user experience and has the opportunity to spark service transformation and design better public services.

Hear, hear.

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#📅 Daily Note: December 2, 2025

Tuesday, 25 November, 2025

📅 Daily Note: November 25, 2025

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Katherine Wastell – Every organisation has some madness:

If everyone spots the problems but no one takes responsibility, things will only get worse. Accountability is the difference between taking a step forward and staying stuck. It takes one brave team to break the cycle.

Full of great insight (via Ben Unsworth).

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Polly Mackenzie – Iconoplastic – a made up word for an important idea:

In other words, it’s not just bureaucracies that resist innovation. It’s innovation that resists bureaucracies. Proof if you need it: a few months ago I had the privilege of attending a conference on the government’s (great) Test Learn and Grow programme, designed to accelerate place-based public service reform. The word ‘Grow’ was missing from half the slides in the presentation.

(via Ben Unsworth)

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Ross Ferguson – An appreciative review of the ‘refreshed’ Digital Strategy for Scotland:

What is good are the references to improving capability in the civil service and not just capacity. The focus is not just about technical skills, but maturity, confidence, and application of digital tooling and ways of working generally across the workforce. Shared approaches, targeted support, and leadership as well as delivery capabilities will all benefit the holistic approach that is needed.

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“CivTech is a Scottish Government programme that brings the public, private and third sectors together to build things that make people’s lives better.”

(via Ross Ferguson)

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#📅 Daily Note: November 25, 2025

Monday, 10 November, 2025

📅 Daily Note: November 10, 2025

Dafydd Singleton – User needs for data standards.

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Dafydd Vaughan – The bridge to nowhere: Why your ‘Target Architecture’ won’t ever deliver:

I’ve lost count of the number of Technical Design Authority meetings I’ve sat in, watching smart people tie themselves in knots over a diagram. We’d debate whether a proposed change conformed to the “target architecture” – a utopian blueprint of a perfectly rationalised, fully integrated, and utterly fictional technology estate.

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Ben Holliday – Analogue innovation (doing one thing well):

The art of making a product that does one thing well has arguably been lost. With so many modern devices, digital overwhelm is everywhere. It’s design without trade-offs. The constraints used to be that products had to focus on a single function or task, or were limited by computing power or what was possible with engineering.

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Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens – Sourcing the stack for local government technology:

…there’s a systemic contradiction that local government is fragmented by design, but given the state of the market, councils often make similar technology choices, then individually procure many of the same products from a small pool of vendors, and separately expend the time of their under-resourced teams managing their own local technology stack of those similar products.

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Ben Thompson – The benefits of bubbles:

What goes up must come down, which is to say bubbles that inflate eventually pop, with the end result being a recession and lots of bankrupt companies. And, not to spoil the story, that will almost certainly happen to the AI bubble as well. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that that is not the end of the story, at least in the best case. Bubbles have real benefits.

(This reminds me again about how much I really want to be the Ben Thompson of local government IT. Just pay me to blog, someone! Please!)

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#📅 Daily Note: November 10, 2025

Friday, 7 November, 2025

📅 Daily Note: November 7, 2025

Ash Mann – The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work:

Good digital strategies aren’t long documents or laundry lists. They’re about ruthless focus – choosing a clear direction and sticking to it, even if that means letting go of attractive ideas.

(via Neilly)

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Digital identity and the UK government’s announceability problem, by Richard Pope:

In the search for announcibility, tying it to the issue of immigration, and allowing the language of a singular ‘ID card’ to permeate, the government appeared to abandon the radical incrementalism and replace it with the sort of big bang tech announcement we all hoped were of the past. It also risked creating inertia for those teams in government who are already delivering. The inertia created by competing priorities, combined with a very particular, British, passive approach to calling out those contradictions, is toxic to delivery in the UK civil service.

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Lloyd nicely links to my newsletter but also points out the hideous URLs it produces for the web version. He’s right, but I am not sure what to do about it.

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I’ve always been leery of the Jetpack plugin – for some reason I can’t remember – but this article has made me consider reconsidering.

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Essex County Council has some excellent guidance around creating forms.

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#📅 Daily Note: November 7, 2025

Monday, 3 November, 2025

📅 Daily Note: November 3, 2025

Set up a new council on localgov.blog today! Looking forward to seeing what they post.

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Some useful links in Ben’s halloweeknote.

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OpenQR.me – “Create beautiful QR codes instantly” (via Giles)

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Created a little online community around Localise Live! last week, using Basecamp. It isn’t very glamorous or exciting, but I’ve not found anything better for communities of practice-esque online spaces.

I worry sometimes about the ownership of the company and some of their problematic views – but at the moment it doesn’t feel like they infect the platform in the way it does at, say, Substack.

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#📅 Daily Note: November 3, 2025

Wednesday, 29 October, 2025

📅 Daily Note: October 29, 2025

Find and reuse digital service elements is a website put together by some folk at the Ministry of Justice that signposts the user to examples of publicly available guidance and patterns for digital work.

Am not entirely sure what I think about it. Obviously it’s a lovely thing to have done, and the world is no worse for it existing, but I’m not sure just how reusable some of these artefacts are in the real world. Certainly the tagline – “Building public services together – one reusable block at a time” – feels a bit of a stretch.

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Rachel Coldicutt – There’s no such thing as a universal digital service:

In a world where Meta has more users than most countries have residents, it seems odd to say that digital services aren’t universal – but universal services need to work for everyone, not just for people who are digitally connected.

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Martin Wright – Mapping is thinking:

We often treat maps as deliverables – neat, tidy artefacts to show what we’re building. But the value of mapping isn’t in the artefact; the value of mapping is in getting there. The process of making the map is what helps us think, collaborate and move a problem forwards.

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Really good post this from Duncan Brown – Design by cliché:

But what “booking” means can vary wildly from service to service. Two thirds of breast screening appointments are administered via mobile vans. This is a different, and differently-complex, sense of “booking” from clinic-based appointments, and different in turn from “booking” a vaccination in a community pharmacy.

These “bookings” have little more in common than a name. And indeed that is exactly what teams at the Ministry of Justice found when they tried to standardise “bookings” for prisons.

I’ve done some thinking around this stuff and agree that saying things like “case management should be the same whether it’s adult social care or housing” is a bit daft. Likewise – bookings in my experience are often best developed using components at a layer of abstraction down – forms, payment, resource management, notifications, etc.

Words like booking, reporting, applying work well as service patterns, a layer of abstraction up from the technical gubbins. It’s still helpful to use them to help service designers and tech folk to speak a common language, but not so helpful for the techs putting together a platform of components.

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Transforming public services for a modern Wales [PDF warning]:

If Wales wants to rise to the challenge of improving public services, we have to change how we design and deliver them.

That means putting people first, adopting modern and open ways of working, drawing on the best digital practices to build services that are simple, efficient, and designed around real life-needs.

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Better tech won’t make joining the indieweb easier, but collectives could:

So how do we get more writers off centralised platforms and on to the indieweb? It’s not unsurprising that a tech audience thinks the answer lies in more, better or “easier” tech. But I think it requires a shift in perspective, away from an individualistic call for everyone to “skill up” and work out how to set up their own website. We need to think collectively, and pool resources. Those who can do all this need to help those who can’t.

Lloyd might be interested in this.

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More great sharing from Emily Webber – Building Communities of Practice that Amplify the Flow of Learning Across Organisations:

Humans learn the need to connect with others early on; we are born without the ability to look after ourselves, so we need that connection to survive, and that need doesn’t go away throughout our lives.

However, many of our organisations follow hierarchical, siloed organisational charts that discourage people from connecting across them, often split into separate cost centres, budgets and targets. Going against our human nature to connect.

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#📅 Daily Note: October 29, 2025

Tuesday, 21 October, 2025

📅 Daily Note: October 21, 2025

Sarah and Carl are taking up the reigns of LocalGovDigital – a Slack-based networks of digital practitioners in local government, and I’m stepping down.

I think they’ll do a great job and am really excited about what they will be able to achieve with the group – hopefully a lot more than I managed!

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I linked to the recent Notify case study on LinkedIn, adding the commentary below. Saving here for posterity 🙂

Feels to me like this ought to be something easily adopted in local government. I did some digging into Notify uptake in local gov a year or so ago, and found that many councils use Notify for one or two things, but it was rarely considered a core component of digital service delivery. Why? Because sending SMS notifications isn’t part of many workflows. Often because it was seen as too expensive when looked at 10 or 15 years ago.

Encouraging councils to send more SMS notifications is the start, because leveraging Notify to do it is an absolute no-brainer.

(Am aware that Notify does more than SMS, but you hopefully get my point.)

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James Plunkett writes Iterate, if you can:

Because linear mentalities have crept back in some places, it would be worth a big new push to restate the basic case for iterative and user-centred methods, and to insist on the associated operating model (e.g. mixed discipline teams). Clarity is key: assert the basic principles of iterative working, explain why it reduces risk and makes better use of public money, be insistent on the model, etc. Test & Learn might be the best framing/vehicle for this, but it will need strong support from the highest levels of government if contemporary management practices and operating models are to become non-negotiable.

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I need to get better at remembering to hit the publish button on the daily note aggregation posts on here. I don’t want to automate it and like having some control, so maybe a calendar entry is the right way to go!

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Nova Constable writes about accessibility and LocalGovDrupal on the Digital Luton blog.

This blog is hosted on localgov.blog – a WordPress instance I host to enable councils to operate ad-free blogs without having to suffer adverts or deal with the hosting issues themselves. Just let me know if you would like one for your council!

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#📅 Daily Note: October 21, 2025

Thursday, 16 October, 2025

📅 Daily Note: October 16, 2025

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Lloyd reports not getting a pingback from me when I linked to his blog. Am not surprised the micropost didn’t ping, but the daily note aggregated version is just a standard post and should have done. Will take a look into it.

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Scaling Digital Infrastructure in a Siloed State: How the UK government designed and financed GOV.UK Notify to prioritise achieving universal public sector adoption:

In 2015, UK government call centres received hundreds of millions of calls about its 7,000+ government services. One in four of these calls was a request for an update on an application or appointment. This drove up call volumes, increased hold times, and was often a source of negative interaction between the public and the government. Worse, they cost the government millions of pounds.

Could the UK government develop a method to deliver trustworthy, accessible information quickly and securely across fragmented industries? What strategies could they use to create universal adoption? And perhaps most challenging: who would pay for it in a government structured around departmental silos? In this case study, we explore how the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) addressed a government-wide challenge by developing a modular digital infrastructure, focusing on how the team evaluated and made key decisions around scaling and financing a cross-government service. In doing so, we highlight the strategic choices and pivotal moments that shaped its success.

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#📅 Daily Note: October 16, 2025

Saturday, 11 October, 2025

📅 Daily Note: October 10, 2025

I newslettered earlier.

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i’ve been enjoying Lloyd’s recent ponderings about blogging.

I’m also really enjoying the way this blog works these days, posting little nuggets that can get pulled into a aggregated post on a daily basis (or when I remember to hit the switch). Each of these ‘microposts’ exists as a separate item in the database, so you could see them all in one place, or even subscribe to the RSS feed for them. Massive thanks again to Steph for making this magic work for me.

I am aware that it’s very link-heavy, and I don’t write much here other than pointing to other people’s stuff. I’d like to write more and reading Lloyd’s stuff has been encouraging!

All this is possible because of open platforms like WordPress and standards like RSS. I don’t really understand what the ‘fediverse’ is, really, but it strikes me that there are two simple things that people need: somewhere to write, and somewhere to read.

I wonder if thing that blogging lacks is what we get with a lot of the walled gardens, which is the that the reading and the writing is in the same place. People like me are happy finding one service to subscribe to blogs in, and another to write posts in. But should WordPress (say) have an inbuilt aggregator? After all, we don’t read and write emails in different apps.

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This blog now has a ‘dark mode’ option – there should be a moon shaped button floating around somewhere on the screen that lets you toggle between the default, rather bright, style; and a much darker, easier on the eyes one.

Very easy to do thanks this WordPress plugin.

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Not come across Digital and Data essentials for senior civil servants before, but it looks a sensible list, and one that could be easily adapted for local government use.

Perhaps as a Skillstats thing? 🤔

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Our daughter Jade took a photo of me to start using on the internet – replacing the rather catfishy one where I have hair and look hopeful. Have spent part of the day updating various accounts and web pages with it.

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Great stuff from Emily Webber on ice breakers.

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#📅 Daily Note: October 10, 2025