Blog posts

Nearly five months ago we revealed Alpha.gov.uk. And then this blog became even quieter. It’s been a few months of big transitions, two of which had to be kept quiet for a while. Since I last wrote here we’ve been busy arranging a move of house (from Harringay to Homerton), have discovered we’ve got another child on the way, and I’ve become a Civil Servant. All three are exciting changes, but it’s the last that I sat down to write about here. For several years I’ve been working on building Ket Lai, initially alone, then with James Weiner, and gradually with a wider selection of collaborators. Things were going well, and we were building up a solid base of clients and getting close to having a couple of products of our own to release. But when the call to the public sector came, it didn’t take long to agree that we’d put Ket Lai on the back-burner and jump on board. ...

Late last night I commented out the HTTP authentication settings, and Alpha.gov.uk was live. I’ve not slept much since then, but so far everything seems to be running smoothly. Apart from my email and twitter clients which are swimming in a deluge of feedback. There’s a quick post from me on the Alphagov blog exploring the way we’re handling geographic information and place names. A longer post is coming later in the week with an outline of the technical architecture of the site, and a few more will follow exploring more nitty gritty details. ...

I’ve been working on an entry for the Alpha.gov.uk blog for publication later this week. The idea is to give a quick overview of how we’ve approached the technical side of building that prototype. It’s been tricky as we have a very diverse audience and a lot of ground to cover, but hopefully it’ll be a helpful start and the coming (post-reveal) weeks will allow a bit more space to expand on some of the key components. Maybe even open source a thing or two? ...

Last time I got round to writing weeknotes I mentioned an exciting new project. I wasn’t meant to say much about it, which is part of the reason that was the last time I got round to writing weeknotes. But today a post on the Cabinet Office digital engagement blog took the wrappers off and we can begin to talk about what we’re up to. ...

It’s a week now since I got off the plane home from my second SxSW Interactive. I’ve primarily spent the intervening time catching up with work, but it’s also provided a little space to read a few other peoples’ take on the event, to listen to the Tech Weekly podcast that the Guardian produced at the event, and to look out for patterns. It seems I was far from alone in starting this year’s South By complaining about the size, but then finding that that subsided as the week wore on. It definitely had a very different feel from just two years ago (and even then people were commenting on how big it was). With events spread around town, distance between talks was a very real consideration in choosing what to go to. Or whether to go to anything at all. Most of the central food establishments had intimidating queues. ...

Ben wrote a piece about a typeface that a lot of people in the UK will have seen around, and are hopefully seeing a lot of at the moment. It’s the one being used by the Fairtrade Foundation on all their materials, and it’s really quite nice. We don’t often hear the stories behind fonts, but since Fair Trade is in large part about hearing the stories behind things we take for granted it’s good to hear this one. So head over to Noisy Decent Graphics and have a read. ...

Matt Thompson’s " A 5-minute framework for fostering better conversations in comments sections" has cropped up in my twitter feed several times over the past few days but it wasn’t until the flight to SxSW that I got a chance to read it. It collects together lots of sensible stuff, and distills it quite helpfully. Definitely something I’ll come back to next time we’re designing commenting systems, or their like. But the line that really leapt out at me was: ...

So I’ve clearly fallen off the weeknote wagon. A big, new, exciting project came up a few weeks back and almost everything has slipped as we’ve dug into it. We’re working with a much bigger team than usual, in a different location to usual. It’s quite a change. There has been time to slip out one new site: a simple presence for Sheridan Tongue’s soundtracks to the BBC series Wonders of the Universe. Sheridan’s contributed the score for both Brian Cox’s “Wonders” series (the latter of which is on TV as I write this) and it’s been great to work with him on getting the site together. ...

A few less meetings this week, but one of those I did squeeze in has led to some fairly rapid results. Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to Lambeth to get started on an intensive project that will occupy most of my time till May. It’s very exciting but a bit hush-hush so I’ll have to be careful what I blog. With that lined up the focus has been on clearing the decks (but not, unfortunately, writing the many blog entries I’ve been meaning to get to). ...

This week has followed in much the same vein as the last. Lots of rushing between meetings, squeezing in the time to do the work that needs to fit around them. There were a couple of exciting meetings about some projects for the coming months, and a slightly harder one trying to figure out whether there’s a realistic business model around a product we’ve been exploring over the past few months. And an afternoon learning a little about Nokia’s new developer platform (on which more, later). ...