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 […]
22 October 2012
Last week we finally launched GOV.UK. On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible*. On Wednesday, the site received over […]
19 January 2011
This is the second part in a recap of everything that happened in the last half of 2010. Part 1 covered July, August & September. This part looks at October and November. October 2010 In October we completed the second phase of the new Consumer Focus website. Earlier in the year we made the move […]
17 January 2011
Whenever there has been an extended gap in my blogging I try and find something to get it going again. It usually involves some kind of recap of the missing months to try and fill in the gap. This time is different only in the sheer amount of things that have happened. Over the last […]
24 May 2010
We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday). Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the […]
23 March 2010
Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publically available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle 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 […]
20 December 2009
Photo: lewishamdreamer (from Flickr) The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening. The focus today is on the cause of the incident and […]
15 October 2009
These are a few notes from day 2 of the Future of Web Apps conference in London. This day turned out to be much more interesting than the last, which is evidenced by the fact that I don’t actually have many notes at all. I’ve tried to fill in the gaps where required. You can see the notes […]