Minding the shop

December 9th, 2009

In my line of work, keeping track of the threads is half the battle. At work, we have (for now) three corporate sites, a sandbox, a development environment, and more. We have social media channels – some corporately-managed, many managed by external agencies in support of our campaigns – and an active stakeholder and media community who like to talk to us and about us, along with ten busy ministers.

We’re also expected to respond quickly to news stories which break in the media on the issues we cover, as well as be responsive to our colleagues in the Press Office, including helping them to monitor and evaluate the reach of their material online.

So ever since some nice chaps from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office blew me away with an internal dashboard they had developed for this purpose, I’ve been keen to set up something similar. Something which I can have open all day and which lets me see quickly if our sites are up, what’s hot on them right now, who’s sending us traffic, and what we’re putting out there in terms of news releases, tweets and multimedia.

I’ve stolen their idea pretty much wholesale, tweaked it slightly towards social media, and come up with this (click to open a larger version):

dashboard - annotated

1. Site availability: we have Pingdom monitoring set up watching our various domains to measure their uptime, and this box uses its API to tell us what’s up and what’s down. Green is good.

2. Popular content: Google Analytics has a little-known API and the excellent GAPI PHP library to help you access it. In more or less real time, this box lists the top 30 pages on the site today. There’s a lot more to the API, which I might write about another time.

3. Top referers: if there’s a spike in traffic, chances are somebody important has linked to us – this shows a list of the top 20 referers today, again powered by Google Analytics.

4. Search engine keywords: More Google Analytics goodness, this shows the top 20 keywords people entered into Google recently which sent them to our site.

5. Custom Site Search keywords: Slightly squiffy this, as the Great Google haven’t quite sorted out their own technology, but in principle this shows the popular search terms people have used within our own site search (which is powered by a Google Custom Search, covering all our key domains).

6. News Releases we’ve issued: using the RSS feed of our news releases which we retrieve via COI’s News Distribution Service, this lets me keep track of what press releases have gone out recently, to help cross check against popular pages on the site and to help us know when to press the button on digital activity in support of them.

7. Social media output: powered by the RSS feed of our FriendFeed account plus some PHP jiggery-pokery, this is maybe the box I find most useful. At a glance I can see new YouTube videos we’ve posted (in red), Flickr sets (navy), and corporate tweets (gold). The aqua boxes show me what agencies are putting out there as part of our marketing campaigns.

8. Replies and mentions: it’s useful to see what people find re-tweetable and how they respond to tweets from @bisgovuk – this box runs off the RSS feed from a Twitter search.

9. News coverage: Not enough for full social media monitoring of course, but for those reports which do mention the Department by name, this RSS feed from Google News Search provides a helpful list, right next to the news releases which they often refer to.

10. Blog coverage: Often a surprisingly different focus from the mainstream media mentions, this box runs off an RSS feed of Google Blog Search results.

11. Our issues in the news: Believe it or not there’s a world beyond our doors, and this aggregated feed (a bundle of RSS feeds from sections of BBC News online relevant to our policy areas, gathered together and shared out again via Google Reader) helps me keep track of the big stories.

So there you are. I’ve been refining and tweaking it while I road test it over the last few weeks. It’s surprisingly simple (around 500 lines of PHP all told) but helps me get on with more interesting things while keeping half an eye on the shop I’m supposed to be minding. And there’s a hint of geek cool in there too. Whatever gets you through the day, eh?

n.b. This code was developed in my own time, using my own resources and information, and is not Crown Copyright. I’m happy to offer anyone who wants one (including my employer) a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use it, bearing in mind it’s early code and I can’t provide much in the way of support – for now, just leave a comment or drop me a line if you’d like a copy.

Filed under Development, Social media, Technical | Comments (17)

A Load of Cobblers: my tumblog on the favourite tools I use

November 24th, 2009

toolbox

Just a quick one to flag for readers who get my stuff by RSS that I’ve got a parallel tumblog alongside this main blog, which I use to post up quick reviews of tools that I like for web work. I’ve called it A Load Of Cobblers, to celebrate the spirit and practice of cobbled-together webbery, made from many individual pieces.

I’ve just posted a few new bits and pieces on there:

  • Feed2JS: a simple Javascript-based way to show an RSS feed on a site
  • Page Saver: a Firefox plugin to take a screenshot of the whole page, not just the visible portion
  • 7 favourite digital engagement tools: from my presentation at ConnectedGeneration back in September

There’s also stuff about the email newsletter software Campaign Monitor, Flash video players and how to get a feed of comments on your Flickr photos.

Coming up in the near future are likely to be snippets on Google Analytics’ API and the GAPI PHP library, the uptime service Pingdom, and Flickr open-source-licensed search tool, Compfight.

Filed under Design, Development, Social media, Technical | Comment (1)

World of WordPress

September 21st, 2009

Cursor

There’s plenty of WordPress-powered online properties in Government right now and some very busy freelancers building them. For a while now, I’ve been trying to compile a list of useful people, agencies, tools and resources for WordPress, so I thought I’d kick it off here. It’s obviously incomplete, and mention here does not necessarily constitute personal recommendation.

Please add any additions, amendments or feedback in the comments and I’ll amend this post over time so it becomes a bit of a living resource. If you’re an agency/developer and have client permission, I’m happy to add some portfolio URLs to your entry below.

Agencies & freelance developers

Worth also joining & asking on the WordCampUK mailing list. More info about WordCamp.

Hosting providers

  • Bytemark (seems to assume slightly more command-line savvy than some hosts)
  • Eduserv
  • WebFusion
  • Memset
  • uRevised
  • I seriously need more options in this category. Please recommend good UK-based WP hosts.

Useful themes & plug-ins

Training & tutorials

UK Government examples (as of September 2009)

See also Puffbox’s archive of reports on WordPress use in Government

Filed under Development, Government, WordPress | Comments (27)

Version 1.1

September 17th, 2009

When BIS was created, we were pretty chuffed to have got a solid website built and launched in 72 hours. But as the weeks passed and the organisation started to build up achievements and an identity of its own, people started to ask when something, y’know, a bit meatier was going to arrive. Today, we launched version 1.1 which is the next step on that journey.

BIS website, version 1.1

1.1 is always an important milestone. The excitement, the blank canvas and the pressure of 1.0 are behind you. The feedback has started to come in. The team starts to think about version 2.0 but right now, it’s important to deliver something just a bit better than what we’ve got which fixes the glaring bugs and takes on board the good ideas – and that’s where 1.1 comes in.

I’ll leave BIS’ resident celebrity webby to explain more of the strategy, save to say that this version is principally about a nicer look and feel and a larger scope of content, moving in the direction of 2.0 due early next year, but still on the WordPress platform and developed in-house by the team for zero external development cost. For now, I just wanted to share three little code snippets I contributed towards:

RSS Extra widget1. The RSS Extra Plugin

WordPress’ built-in RSS widget is handy in a pinch, but it’s not ideal. It predefines the format of the list, and makes the title of the widget link to the specified URL in the feed, even if this isn’t really what you want (e.g. a Pipes page or a search form). So I spent a satisfying evening head scratching and learning how to roll my own* WordPress plugin widget and came up with RSS Extra which lets you:

  • specify the link to use in the title of the widget
  • add some arbitrary html above and below the feed listing
  • show the date in a friendlier format
  • decide whether or not you want to show the orange RSS icon in the header

The refreshed BIS site uses the widget to show news items and speeches, linking to our own news page, of which more below.

* (yes, I know there are more sophisticated alternatives)

2. RSS Librarian

It was decided a while ago to use COI’s News Distribution Service to handle online publication of our news releases – rather than duplicate effort by adding them separately to an archive on the BIS site. It’s a sophisticated service well-used by press officers and journalists, and a great cross-government resource. But we’d like to feature the stories we publish there on our own site too, since there isn’t an easy way to link to a listing of BIS releases on the NDS site itself. NDS offers an RSS feed which could make this possible, though it is reset on a monthly basis so isn’t a workable archive.

RSS Librarian is a little script run on a cron job to grab an RSS feed, check it for new items, and store those items locally in a monthly archive and a global archive. This drives the BIS news archive. To me, this is RSS fulfilling its potential as a proper syndication tool between government sites which delivers a better user experience as well as reduced costs by creating once and publishing twice.

3. Did you mean?

With two sites merging into one, there’s been a misconception amongst some colleagues that a www.legacysite.gov.uk/url/to/something address will automatically now be accessible via www.newsite.gov.uk/url/to/something. We’ve put some redirects in on an ad hoc basis, but in a large corporate organisation, it’s hard to avoid people making assumptions which could lead to irritated users hitting 404 errors. So – by far the simplest of these code snippets – is a little checker included in the WordPress 404 page which takes the requested URL, goes off and checks if it’s valid on each of the legacy sites, and if so, suggests that that may in fact be where you intended to go.

404 checker

These are all free to adapt and reuse under, for now, Crown Copyright and a GPL licence.

Filed under Development, Government, WordPress | Comments (9)

Corporate homepage design: who’s doing it right?

August 28th, 2009

goodcorpweb screenshot

Recently, I’ve been grappling with the issue of what a corporate homepage should do. Obviously, a lot of what I do is central government-oriented but in this case I’ve been casting the net quite wide, as the interface design problems of corporate organisations in whatever sector are actually pretty similar.

A corporate homepage generally isn’t trying to sell, but it might be trying to signpost customers quickly to an e-commerce microsite or customer portal. It’s not aimed at a nice, neat target audience, because it’s got to work for journalists, students, staff, investors and a whole bunch of other people. It’s promoting a wide portfolio of products or services, trying to illustrate it with imagery which is engaging but also generic. And corporate homepages by definition have a large number of people within the organisation clamouring for space and priority.

Some focus on identifying and signposting different audiences, some try and help people accomplish their goal and some just aim to tell compelling human-scale stories about megalithic organisations.

So I’m starting a collection of good corporate homepages, using the Bookmarklist open source tool that powers Digitalgovuk. In a nutshell:

  1. Find an intelligent, elegant homepage of a corporate organisation (i.e. not a startup or personal site, and not primarily a sales or campaign site)
  2. Bookmark it in Delicious using the magic tag ‘goodcorpweb’ along with other descriptive tags e.g. the sector, the style and anything else that’s relevant
  3. It will magically appear at: http://www.helpfultechnology.com/goodcorpweb for anyone to browse and discover

Between us, we can give corporate web teams the world over a useful collection of great inspirations for a tricky interface design challenge. Thanks!

Filed under Design, Development, Government | Comments (2)
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A load of cobblers: my Tumblog on the tools I use and how I use them