Pezholio

As a lot of you probably know, I’m a big fan of open data, as well as driving innovation and making it easier to share information, it’s also a lot of fun.
Now, councils are pretty slow in picking this stuff up, for all sorts of reasons (lack of knowledge / interest, lack of technical skills, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been thinking recently about trending topics on Twitter and how it would be brilliant if there could be some kind of local trending system that picked up trends in a local area. Twitter already has location based searching, so it should be pretty trivial for a developer (albeit one with more skill than me)
Step [...]

Pity the poor postcode, for years, he’s been locked up in a basement at the Royal Mail offices, and only let out if someone pays a humungous fee to let him out.
Well, thanks to the mysterious Ernest Marples, the postcode has been let out of his cell and is free to run about, jump and [...]

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 [...]

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:
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Today marks a coming together (if you’re an idiot, you might call it a synergy), of all the obsessions I’ve blogged about so far – Planning Applications, APIs and Twitter. It’s called TwitterPlan, and it allows you to receive alerts of planning applications in your area via Twitter.
It uses the Planning Alerts API and sends [...]

With the increasing popularity of Twitter and the like, it’s becoming more and more important to keep those characters down with URL shortening services such as is.gd, cli.gs and of course, the ubiquitous TinyURL
A lot of these services offer APIs, taking a long url and returning the short url. But a lot of these are [...]

Well, it’s was a busy old day for me yesterday, sitting in the warm at home and establishing myself in the blogosphere, and I’ve been blown away by how much traffic my last post attracted. It was one of the commenters on my last post (Martin Stone) who inspired me to post today. He said:

Great [...]