Google Docs as an easy document library

Regular readers will know how much I love Google’s online tools. I recently blogged about how Google Docs can be used to create open data formats and today I’ve taken this further by using Google Docs recently released Share Folders to prototype an easy document library. As usual I’ve used some public documents from City of Lincoln Council and you can find the results here.

What’s basically going on here is that I’ve created a root folder within Google Docs which I have set to be shared globally. Any folders and documents within this then automatically inherit this share permission, allowing them to be accessed by anyone. Simple. What it basically does is enable an organisation, be it a local authority, some business or anyone, to store all their public documentation online and logically categorise it for easy consumption. Combined with the fact that it’s all being delivered through Google Docs via embeds and therefore does not really require download by the end user then this becomes a brilliant way to distribute documents. It’s also very easy to keep updated and any changes made to native Google docs are reflected in real time.

There are, however a few niggling problems with this. The shared  folders do not have a search on them which would be fantastic, especially if they were to be used to store lots of documents. Also, there is no easy way to download the native Google documents in their “whizzy” open data formats (RTF, RSS etc) without “opening” them, despite the fact that they’re already open. This system will also be somewhat detached from an organisations main website, i.e. not easy to link in using traditional CMS commands (for basic CMS publishers) or included in search results. It would also be top if the shared folder generated its own RSS feed.

But, all in all, I think that this is a very good application of Google Docs, once again. The more Google adds to these cloud based services, the more we can look at using them creatively.

I’ve also started using this for myself – look down the right navbar and you’ll see a link to my public Google Docs. Anything I want to make public will go in here so check back often for new additions. Again, would be good if I could RSS it but – hey ho

Create a GeoRSS feed using UK Postcodes with Yahoo Pipes

Something I’m playing with quite a bit at the moment is mapped data. A year ago we launced a system on our website to allow people to report instances of lost and found pets. Thinking about how we could add value to this service I decided to add an RSS feed and try to get some kind of map on the site to show the locations that the animals were lost/found in. The RSS was easy enough to generate (pagescraping in Yahoo! Pipes) but the map required a little more jiggery-pokery.

To get the location, I added a field to the form which requested the user to input a UK postcode. Again with Pipes, I fed this postcode data through the location generator which split out the relevant location, long and lat values. I extracted the long and lat values into geo:long and geo:lat variables respectively. These are the standard names for GeoRSS long and lat values.

The resulting RSS feed was now fully geocoded; the proof was dropping it into Google Maps and watching the points on the map correspond to the postcodes from the webpage. Test it yourself at these links:

The original pipe: http://is.gd/u4J9
The corresponding GeoRSS feed: http://is.gd/u591
The Google Map: http://is.gd/u59j

Get your Twitter Home updates via email – Part 2

A quick follow on from the last Twitter Home Updates post, I’ve actually done a little tinkering with the pipe and created this one: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=efc6a71d7ae898bb990ec53fdd8ee898. This new pipe adds a further branch which customises the whole process specifically for Twitter, namely creating a feed which only contains tweets that have specifically been addressed to the user with the @ prefix.

So now comms teams can monitor their organisations Twitter stream to read only those tweets that are specifically addressed to them, making sure that any external correspondence is not missed!

If you make this use of this on your organisation, drop me a line in the comments and let me know!

#localgovweb Get your Twitter Home updates via email

Apologies for the hash tag in the title; wanted to make sure this got into the Localgovweb Twitter group…

One of the key issues I’ve seen with Twitter as a two way communication tool for organisations such as councils is the fact that you either need a bespoke desktop tool or browser plugin to get “live” updates from the people you are following; something that I am sure would not be possible in most organisations with stringent IT protocols. The only alternative is to keep refreshing your Twitter homepage at regular intervals however in the busy day to day life of a Comms team, I’m sure that this would not be feasible. The Twitter homepage does provide an RSS feed of your followers updates, however you need to provide your login credentials to see this. The ideal thing would be to have an email pop into your inbox every time there is an update. You can then set up email rules to file these to address at a later date. So how can we get these email updates?

I found the answer in this post: http://nik.me/access-authenticated-feeds-google-reader-using-yahoo-pipes. The Pipe that the author has created does the job very nicely and, using Yahoo’s built in email notification service, you can choose to have the results emailed as they come in or as a daily digest. This way the pipe feed will never be published, keeping your login credentials as confidential as possible. Still, as a precaution I took a clone of the pipe and used it from my own Yahoo login.

So this way Comms teams can keep abreast of anything INCOMING traffic on their companies Twitter stream at their leisure, without having to constantly check the homepage. This should also mean that they should not miss anything which may be regarded as direct correspondence and can reply accordingly.

City of Lincoln Council New Homepage

The redesigned City of Lincoln Council Homepage

Very plesed here; last night the new homepage for the City of Lincoln Council went live. My involvement in this project is as designer; I worked on the visual design of the homepage, looking at examples from other sites to see what worked and what didn’t, before developing the formal spec which was then handed to our developers at A Recipe for Success. The final result meets all requirements perfectly and should help us to deliver relevant information in an easier to follow way, as well as being more vibrant and somewhat easier on the eye. It also gives us an greater amount of flexibility over the old home page to deliver a mix of text based and visual elements.

Shout up your thoughts in the comments!