Last week was a very short week with both a bank holiday and a day of annual leave. Despite this it was probably more productive than previous weeks. On Tuesday I attended a show and tell to see the work that’s been done over the last sprint. It’s great to see things starting to come [...]
Author Archive: Dafydd Vaughan
Week notes #2
12 May 2013
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Week notes #1
04 May 2013
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A number of people are starting to put together week notes about what they have been up to over the past 5 days of work. I want to give this a go too, partly so I can look back in a few months time and remind myself what has been achieved. I probably won’t get [...]
The internet is fragile
28 Jan 2013
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At some point in the last few weeks a lot of the things I worked on back in Consumer Focus disappeared from the internet. The sites were turned off and the URLs redirected to the organisation homepage. There is no explanation or notice explaining why you end up on that homepage and you would be [...]
Surviving long distance commuting
22 Jan 2013
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As many of my friends and colleagues will confirm, I spent a large portion of the last 18 months commuting to work. Initially from Cardiff to London, then from Abergavenny to London. Both journeys over 2 hours in each direction. It wasn’t really practical to do this on a daily basis, either from a time [...]
Exploring local government services online
14 Nov 2012
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Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website. We do [...]
Hello GOV.UK
22 Oct 2012
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Last week we finally launched GOV.UK. On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible*. On Wednesday, the site received over [...]
Working towards launch
07 Oct 2012
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As the launch of GOV.UK draws nearer, it would be a mistake to assume that the beta is in it’s final state. The development and content teams are continuing to make tweaks and changes to the site based on feedback and testing. This will continue both up to and after it becomes the official site [...]
Brushing off the cobwebs
29 Sep 2012
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Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government. Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary: The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many [...]
Helping to build a single domain for government
05 Sep 2011
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Just under two and a half years ago I joined CF Labs – a new team based within Consumer Focus with a remit to build useful online tools and make data more useful and accessible. Over that time, we’ve worked to make product recall information more useful and helped to make it easier to reduce [...]