Projects

Details of significant projects that I’ve been involved in.

City of Lincoln Council

October 2009 – Google Docs Integration

Councillor Allowances, published to the City of Lincoln Council Website via Google Docs

I’d previously dabbled with this to publish usage metrics on our website here, but the page we launched on the morning of 6th October displays details of councillor allowances; more mainstream, public data.

The process is simple – copy and paste your XLS spreadsheet into a Google Spreadsheet, hit the big blue “Share” button and select “Publish as a Web Page”. Select the sheets you wish to publish (if you have many), tick “Automatic Publishing” and then select the flavour you want. First off I used the “HTML to embed in a page” option – this gave me the iFrame that allows the user to read the document in the page without downloading a PDF or navigating away from our site. I then grabbed links for CSV and RSS flavours to encourage reuse and resyndication, and finally provided links to a PDF version and standalone web version to allow the user choice.

But why is this better? Here’s some of the benefits of this approach:

• We don’t force the user to download a document to read it – the information is presented to them right there on the page.
• Google will automatically convert the document to reusable flavours – we can publish these and encourge reuse.
• It’s easier to maintain – instead of having to upload a new version of the document, change links on the site, remove the old document etc, etc, all we need do is update the remote file on Google Docs.

There are a few cons, however:

• There has to be some consideration on how this is managed – as an organisation we do hold sensitive data which could easily be leaked through something like Google Docs so…
• …Google Docs is banned across most of our network (not boasting, but as web guy I get special access). This makes it a problem for officers to get on board and help republish this data.
• There could be accessibility issues – I need to do some testing in this area but I’m not ruling it out as yet.

On a whole, though, this integration should work to make data more accessible and make it easier for users to read documents on our website that they would have had to download in the past. I’m hoping that we can move to integrate this across the website and will be keeping this blog up-to-date as this moves ahead…

July 2009 – Lincoln Christmas Market Website

Lincoln Christmas Market Website

I’m particularly pleased with the Lincoln Christmas Market website. Launched mid July 2009, it’s self hosted on a WordPress MU install. The idea behind it is to provide a platform to easily release information about the market as it becomes available, be very customisable for the City Council and also promote discussion and involvement. There are plans to use it to liveblog the actual market, posting pictures and video as they are taken. Hopefully I’ll post up about this when it happens as I should be involved!

July 2009 – Lincoln Bin Calendar Search

I don’t claim full ownership of this project as two of my colleagues had been working hard for quite some time to standardise the way this information is stored so that we can form a search round it.

We were investigating a number of solutions from integration into MyLincolnshire to a bespoke search form. In the end I stepped in and developed a front end using our Achieve Forms package. This was an important project, not only because it was so long in the running and is a benefit to the users of our website, but also because it was a great proof of concept for using Achieve Forms to perform database searches.

April 2009 – Local Authority Mapping Collective

An ongoing project with the aim to bring together publically available mapped information into collaborative maps that can then be used in mashups. At the time of writing I’m gathering numbers at the LAMC grou.ps site. Hopefully this project will have legs going forwards and will generate some decent data that can be reused.

April 2009 – TwitterPlan

TwitterPlan - Get local planning alerts via a Twitter DM

I played a small part in this project which was primarily driven by Stuart Harrison of Lichfield DC.

TwitterPlan is a Twitter / PlanningAlerts.com mashup which allows Twitter users to recieve planning alerts via twitter Direct Messages. For my part I developed the look and feel of the site, taking obvious influence from the Twitter look while trying to keep things bold and user friendly. Mike Pollard who designed the Twitter Bird that features.

January 2009 – Community Voice

Community Voice - the City of Lincoln Council consultation satelite site

The premise of this satelite site is to have a simple solution to hosting all of our ongoing consultations in one place. While this functionality could easily have been achieved on our current website, I suggested that we maybe should also allow members of the public to openly comment on consultations, giving us another channel of communication. As this functionality is not native to our website, we would have had to look at getting something extra specced up and developed, which would have taken time and cost money or, alternatively, look at another more immediate solution. We went with the latter.

Enter WordPress.com. Having already hosted this blog on WP.com, I knew the system very well and thought that it could do what we wanted. On 29th January 2009, when a couple of consultations came up, I put together a proof of concept on the platform to show our Policy team who loved the idea. A quick tidy up, some introductory text and a custom masthead later and we “launched” Community Voice on our website on the same day.

December 2008 – Homepage redesign

The redesigned City of Lincoln Council Homepage

While the City of Lincoln Council “new look” website was launched in Febuary 2008, work began shortly after to “re-evaluate” the homepage of the website. The goal was to make it more dynamic and easier to tailor towards specific audiences and seasonal trendings. I was involved at a design and specification level, developing a number of visuals which were distributed internally and externally to guage opinion, before a final visual and detailed specification was drawn up to send to our developers, A Recipe for Success. The final homepage was delivered in December 2008.

February 2008 – New Website Launch

While much of the legwork had been done prior to my joining the authority, one of my primary duties as Web Co-Ordinator was to help launch the new website. This involved liaising with content creators to improve the quality of articles to be published on the site, training publishers in how to use the content management system and assisting with the publishing of content, as well as the design of bespoke user group homepages.