28 January 2013. 2 Comments
At some point in the last few weeks a lot of the things I worked on back in Consumer Focus disappeared from the internet. The sites were turned off and the URLs redirected to the organisation homepage. There is no explanation or notice explaining why you end up on that homepage and you would be […]
14 November 2012
Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website. We do […]
12 January 2012
Today I’ve written about how we will be using cookies on the gov.uk beta website. An extract is below, and you can read the full entry on the Government Digital Service blog. The use of cookies on websites has become an increasingly hot topic over the past few months. A new EU law – specifically […]
27 July 2011
“The law was meant to protect the privacy of people using the Internet. To accomplish this, the EU made over 90% of websites illegal” – Oliver Emberton, silktide. Back in May I wrote about the new EU law on cookies that came into effect this year and will be enforced from May 2012. On Monday, […]
12 July 2011
I admit it; I’m a bit of a train buff. I don’t stand around at the end of platforms recording the numbers of trains, but I do like to know what is going on and how everything works. I’ve been a regular user of trains for nearly 10 years. When I was in college, I […]
24 May 2011. 2 Comments
Later this week a new law comes into effect – the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011. This law requires all website operators in the EU to gain consent from visitors before storing or retrieving information from a visitors computer. Essentially, this law blocks the use of cookies until a user has […]
26 January 2011
This is the third and final part in a recap of everything that happened in the last half of 2010. Part 1 covered the July, August and September including the launch of a redesigned CF Labs website. The second part covered the launch of the new website for Consumer Focus and the second phase of […]
31 January 2010
Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build “cool stuff”. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them. On Friday, Charlie and I attended a […]
15 December 2009. 1 Comment
It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate.org website. Sometimes I […]
27 October 2009. 1 Comment
When you move into a new area, how do you find out about the community you are going to be living in. How do you find out about the community groups, the local services, the bus times. Some of the more technology savvy amongst us might look towards the web in the hope that the information is […]