Monday 20 July 2009

One small step for blogger but one giant leap for Thanet District Council IT


The council's website now has feeds on its news page they haven't got them onto the documents part of the site yet but it's a start and hopefully I will eventually be able to stop publishing their stuff for them.


I wonder if they will ever reach a stage where the public can comment on their site and the comments be visible after moderation.


There are a few teething problems one being that not all of their press releases appear in one place, some only on the councils home page others on their press release page and most on both.


It also seems to have effected the way their search box appear in Internet Explorer 8 this doesn't matter much as the search box doesn't work properly yet, but I am confident that they are working on improvements.

2 comments:

  1. Small steps Michael..!
    What you and I can do using a third-party service isn't mirrored in the public sector which has to follow regulated processes for its IT function. With the best will in teh world these things take time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Simon I am truly impressed that they have got as far as they have.

    I think part of the problem is that government has legislated its use of IT to the point where it has forced itself into a position where this no way out of a sort of dated time warp.

    In the private sector, those of us that actually use the internet to generate the wealth that pays for the public sector, we use and experiment with every new thing that comes along both to save money and to reach more people.

    I sometimes wonder in the current public sector deluge of red tape, if the internet was invented today would government allow itself to use it at all.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.