Pezholio

I love Fixmystreet – it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a national problem reporting hub, while other council website bury their reporting facilities under pages and pages of navigation, Fixmystreet is simple, quick and direct.
What I also love is its openness, as well as being able to pull out reports for problems in your [...]

With all this talk of data, and online, we can often lose sight of the real, physical world (as a certified iPhone addict, I know I do – there’s been a few times I’ve almost walked into a lampost due to me paying more attention to my phone than what’s going on in front of [...]

I love Wordpress (hell, I use it for my blog don’t I?) and for a while I’ve been looking for an excuse to add to the community and build a plugin.
Whilst working on a new community blog for the North Lichfield Initiative I found that excuse.
The guy I was training to update the blog [...]

Well, it happened. today, the Royal Mail have issued ernestmarples.com with a takedown notice, demanding that the service be taken down immediately under pain of legal action.
For those of you who don’t know, Ernest Marples was / is a system that provided not-for-profit sites (such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com, Planning Alerts and, by extension Twitterplan) with [...]

In case you’ve had your head buried in a good few feet of sand, then you’ll know all about the issues surrounding the new Birmingham City Council website. I won’t get into it too much here, but, suffice to say, the project was over budget, late and didn’t deliver half of what is expected from [...]

Health warning
Before I go any further, it’s worth pointing out that my views are my own, and not the views of my employer – just so you know like.

Well, it’s finally happened – massively over budget, and over three years late, Birmingham City Council’s website has finally launched.
And what a disappointment it is, admittedly it’s [...]

Some of you may have seen my blog post about the Ernest Marples API a few weeks ago, and since then there’s been no slapped wrists from the Post Office and a lot of people voicing their support
There’s also been a Perl helper library courtesy of Andy Armstrong and, as Perl looks a little bit [...]

With the recent publication of the Digital Britain report and Gordon Brown calling on Tim Berners-Lee to help open up access to government data, there’s been a lot of talk about public organisations opening up data.
Most of this has focused around APIs and linked data (something I’m very passionate about already), but there’s much simpler [...]

Well, the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference is over, the announcements have been made, and version 3.0 of the iPhone software is coming out next week.
If (like me) you’re a developer, or you’ve managed to :ahem: ‘acquire’ a copy of the version 3.0, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of cool new things, like search, voice [...]

Yesterday, I had a quick interview with Liz Azyan of LGEO Research about Twitterplan, the whys, wherefores and hows. More information is on the LGEO Research blog, but you can check out the interview below:
AudioPlayer.embed(”audioplayer_1″, {soundFile:”aHR0cDovL3d3dy5sZ2VvcmVzZWFyY2guY29tL2F1ZGlvL1R3aXR0ZXJwbGFuUGV6aG9saW8ubXAzA”});