Government IT

As you will know if you read this blog recently I have been trying to get the the council to drag TDCIT kicking and screaming into the twenty first century, one thing I pointed out to them was that parts of their website didn’t work on the later versions of Internet Explorer.

Having countered their unlikely argument that most people that used their website, used older versions they eventually put this right.

I should point out to all of my readers that using older versions of Internet Explorer means that your computer is not secure when you access the internet and that you could easily have something nasty happen to you.

Many thanks to reader Keith for pointing out this article click here to read pointing out that the MoD are using insecure browsers, presumably this could even lead to members of the armed services being killed.

I am told that our own dear council are slowly coming round to the idea that not all is well with TDCIT and more improvements will be made eventually.

Below is the gist of what I said to them today about it.

As far as what is visible to me goes the councils website search still doesn’t function it won’t even find things on their homepage, I just tried typing in Gary Rhodes who is the subject of an article there.

There isn’t any reason why they couldn’t use the Google one as many other councils do.

There are still no feeds for their press release pages, an embedded blog with the press officers having access to post on it would do the trick for free.

At the time of writing 4 pm today neither of the last two press releases that I published yesterday at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ had appeared on the TDC website although I do concede they are getting better with pretty much all of the press releases getting up within three days.

There does seem to have been some increase in the documents available in html, although where the document is an image of a document i.e. it has been scanned it always appears as a pdf file. It is as though they lack the ability to publish ordinary image files, this may be the case as they make so little use of their press release photos.

They are still bouncing back emails that they shouldn’t be I just tried simon.moores@thanet.gov.uk in a normal sane world and in any other organisation I have come across from the house of commons down they only use one format for email addresses derived from a persons name.

Still no linier scales appearing on planning documents, this is something that could be solved with a few rubber stamps. At the moment you can’t tell the dimensions of any building if you view the plans online making the whole expensive business of putting them there almost pointless.

In all of this I discovered that TDC have their own Utube account http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ThanetCouncil&view=videos many of the videos are produced for them by professionals and most of them never appear on the TDC website. Just another wasted resource like the press release photos.