Dan Hilton

With the eponymous growth of so called “micro”-blogging services like twitter and Jaiku, so everything these days on the web is either getting smaller or bigger. Recently I had to build a site for my girlfriend, a little site that showcased her work as freelance writer and took a feed from her blog. Now I could have built about five html pages, a mini cms using smarty or some other framework. Yet they all seemed overkill for what is basically brochureware with an emphasis on the design rather than anything else.

So I reached for my jquery and set to work building a single page picosite. I used a tabs plugin to create an array of divs that served as the different aspects of the site. I also used the ajax built into jquery to pull a locally cached version of her last blog entry. I could have used a php include but thought it would be interesting to use the ajax.

I started with a photoshop mock-up, taking inspiration from Laura’s many notepads and subbing books she still has from Uni. Working with the tabs made this a natural choice. Having assembled the graphical assets and worked out my basic structure, I started coding the html and css. I mixed a google analytics account so she can see who is viewing her site and also did some basic seo work on making sure the main search engines knew of her new site.

In all I’m quietly pleased with the site, to see for yourself click here: http://www.laurabarnhouse.com/

Having worked at the Welsh Assembly and had to regularly use their website for preparing briefing, I was interested to see the new site

up and live. However, my shock was at the past record of proceedings. Rather than keeping the (bad) html versions, they distilled all the original word docs into pdfs, a inaccessible format (according to Adobe own checker which I checked them with).

Now normally I wouldn’t be as fussed - you see design choices like this across the web, mainly made to save money and to lower scope. I understand that and I also understand that re-formating eight years of proceedings is no fun. However, having endeavoured to help MySociety, I wanted to add the Welsh Assembly to theyworkforyou.com. Now I have to scrap a lot of the code and start again.

Adding support for the Welsh Assembly record of proceedings would mean that all those AM’s who are blogging crazy, could have widgets displaying their last speeches and questions from the Senedd. You could also have an alerts system, like Google alerts and get an email when a particular topic came up. Beats paying crazy money for ‘monitoring’ from lobby firms.

Needless to say I am making headway, having got a list of the current AM’s in an xml format like the house of commons and am working towards integrating the old AM’s.

I really should have posted this earlier but I just haven’t had time to do this until now. So for all it’s glory, watch me speak about Web 2.0 at the Tachi-Morris centre in Taunton.

The Video (Flash player 7 required)