wordpress

Drip, drip… more ICELE news

David Wilcox pointed me in the direction of the latest E-Government newsletter from Headstar, and their article about ICELE’s slow and rather painful death:

In the medium term, the government is considering an overhaul of e-democracy policy which could bring into being a new cross-government agency to replace ICELE and draw in elements of similar work currently scattered across the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Progress in that direction will be made following the publication by DLG this summer of a white paper on citizen empowerment…

CLG concern over ICELE’s operations is thought to centre on its spending on staff and management and a failure to achieve its initial broad objectives. However, Ellis told E-Government Bulletin that charges of overspending were “plainly not true”.

Interesting! But also rather messy and unpleasant…

I was giving a little thought the other night to th poor councillors who had started blogging using ICELE’s system, ‘Blog in a Box’, and who might now be a little concerned about where, if anywhere, their platform might be going now.

My advice to them would be to move to WordPress, either by using the free hosted option at WordPress.com or by hosting it themselves with their own install from WordPress.org. If any of you come across this blog and need some help, let me know.

Local stuff

I always like reading Andrew Brown‘s roundups of stuff that’s happening in his area – Lewisham – that he regularly posts to his blog. I haven’t the discipline to do anything regularly, but here are a couple of things I’ve been looking at recently.

First up is that I took another look at the website for my village – Broughton, near Kettering in Northamptonshire. Before you click the link be warned: it’s not a very modern design. Indeed, as I suspected, a quick ‘View Source’ shows that the thing is done in Frontpage (argh!). But ignore that…

…because the content in fabulous. It’s a really, really good community resource. There’s stuff for the Parish Council, loads and loads of photos and bits of history about the village. Elaine Bradshaw, who is behind the site, really has done a terrific job.

The only shame is that I can’t find any contact details for her on the site, firstly to congratulate her on what she has achieved, but also to wonder how much easier it would be if we WordPress’d the whole thing. Maybe stuck all the photos up on Flickr, made it easier for anyone in the village to contribute… If somehow you end up reading this, Elaine, do get in touch.

Secondly, on the way to work today I saw a large fluorescent sign, imploring those that saw it to ‘Save Naseby Battlefield!’. I wasn’t under the impression that the battlefield was under any threat, but apparently it is:

Power company E.ON is investigating the possibility of installing turbines close to the historic battlefield.

The proposals have been met with anger from historians, who are working on plans to boost the national reputation of Naseby by building a visitor centre at the battle site.

A further bit of digging revealed that the campaign has its own site, and it runs on WordPress! Stop Kelmarsh Windfarm is the name of the site, which I can’t help but feel is a rather negative slant on things (‘Save Naseby Battlefield’ sounds much nicer, I think).

It also confuses the hell out of me. I mean, wind farms are good things, right? But heritage stuff is important too… argh!

Upgrading…

…this blog to WordPress 2.5. Possible weirdness ahead!

Update: upgrade went fine, with the exception that my theme got overwritten, and my backup wasn’t complete. Hence why you might be looking at the boring old default theme. Am on the lookout for a new one, as rebuilding the old would be too depressing. Any suggestions gratefully received in the comments.

Update 2: giving the rather lovely Curved a run out at the moment. Any feedback on the new look?

How to paste stuff into WordPress

Most people have WordPress’ rich text editor turned on, because generally speaking, it makes life a lot easier. It does have its problems though – one is when embedding media from places like YouTube and SlideShare and the other is when copying and pasting content from other applications like (gasp!) Word. I’ll cover the latter here, and show how you can stop your formatting going all wonky when pasting in.

The secret is in an additional set of tools which can only be discovered when the ‘advanced toolbar’ is displayed. You can do this by clicking the little button that looks like this:

Advanced toolbar

This then pops open another row of icons which let you do all sorts of exciting things:

toolbar

They are, from left to right: select formatting from your stylesheet; underline (this is baaad); full justify text; choose font colour; paste without formatting; paste from Word (aha!); remove formatting; clean up code; insert symbol (like this: © for example); undo; and finally redo.

To paste text from Word, then, select and copy your text in the document in Word, then switch to your browser where you are posting from, and click the paste from Word icon. This will pop up another window for you to paste your text into, so do that and then  hit ‘Insert’. WordPress will then have a pretty good stab at converting your formatting into something it understands. Bingo!

If that doesn’t work, you are probably best off using the paste without formatting option, and then reformatting your text within the WordPress editor itself.

lgSHOUT!

lgSHOUT!

lgSHOUT! is another little service I have put together for local government, following on from LGSearch, which went a little way to fixing the problem of getting relevant search results. lgSHOUT! tries to do something about communication.

The idea behind it is that it’s a Twitter for local government types. People can easily sign up and then post short messages to the rest of the community using a box on the home page, so no need to mess about with complicated blog editors and the like. People can respond to others by directly commenting on a shout, or by posting a shout of their own. Everyone can have an avatar and at the moment that’s handled by Gravatar.

So what sort of things might people want to use this service for?

  • Posting interesting links they’ve seen on the web
  • Yelling for help on something
  • Sharing good practice
  • Having a bit of a chat

It’s built on WordPress and the Prologue theme, and as such took about an hour to put together. The biggest problem was getting URLs that were pasted into the box to be parsed into clickable links – in the end I found this plugin. Bits of work to do include:

  • Trying to get it to work with TinyURL like what Twitter does
  • Giving the option of hosting avatars at lgSHOUT! as well as using Gravatar
  • Tidying up the design a bit

So, I hope it’s useful to local gov folk. If you’ve got any queries about it, or fancy having something similar for another sector, just let me know!

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