Blog

  • myPublicServices ’09

    I had a fantastic day at myPublicServices on Thursday. It was a real success. For the first time in a long time (perhaps ever!) I was truly conflicted after lunch: all the sessions looked great, and I could only go to one. Annoying!

  • Testing WordPress with Cucumber

    I should probably introduce myself first: I’m Mallory, Dextrous Web employee #1. We do quite a bit of work with WordPress, and one of the problems we’ve found is that it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of automated testing that we do with the rest of our projects. The code for themes easily gets…

  • The wraps come off data.gov.uk!

    The UK’s version of data.gov, ably put together by the Cabinet Office, has just launched in private beta. We got to have a sneak peak, and it’s great! The site is a blend of the US’s equivalent, data.gov, and Directgov | Innovate. It’s got a listing of available data packages, powered by the Comprehensive Knowledge…

  • The Learning Revolution Begins…

    In five weeks, mostly during August 2009, we put together a bespoke site, built using Ruby on Rails, that communicated the client’s key messages, linked into their existing web presence, allowed users to submit events and for those events to be moderated, allowed organisations with lots of data to import it en masse, and —…

  • NHS Choices have a new hospital rating tool

    Just discovered (via Twitter) that NHS Choices have released a new tool for users to rate hospitals. Fantastic. Government should embrace user generated content more often than it does, and feedback on Hospitals is a great application for it — but their implementation could do with a bit of tweaking. First: the tool has been…