The personal blog of
Dafydd Vaughan

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Cookies on the gov.uk beta

Today I’ve written about how we will be using cookies on the gov.uk beta website. An extract is below, and you can read the full entry on the Government Digital Service blog. The use of cookies on websites has become an increasingly hot topic over the past few months. A new EU law – specifically [...]

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Helping to build a single domain for government

alphagov

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 [...]

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An update on the EU cookie law

eucookielaw

“The law was meant to protect the privacy of people using the Internet. To accomplish this, the EU made over 90% of websites illegal” – Oliver Emberton, silktide. Back in May I wrote about the new EU law on cookies that came into effect this year and will be enforced from May 2012. On Monday, [...]

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Using website cookies in the EU

Later this week a new law comes into effect – the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011. This law requires all website operators in the EU to gain consent from visitors before storing or retrieving information from a visitors computer. Essentially, this law blocks the use of cookies until a user has [...]

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Costs of government websites

cabinet-office-clampdown

On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in [...]

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Helping you to Stay Private

StayPrivate.org - the new website from CF Labs

On Thursday, CF Labs launched their latest project – StayPrivate.org – into public beta. This site is designed to make it easier to sign up for the various marketing opt-out services that exist in the UK. There are lots of different opt-out services that exist, all of which have separate sign-up forms and require you [...]

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The new government on the web

New Department for Culture, Media and Sport website

We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday). Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the [...]

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A quick note on MP expenses

As some of you may remember, a few months ago I waded in on the MP expenses controversy with a crowd-sourcing website for putting together a list of what they all claimed. The Guardian (and others) produced their own websites that did a similar job and generally worked better. Since then, there have been further [...]

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Hacks and Hackers working together

ScraperWiki: Hacks and Hackers Hack Day

Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build “cool stuff”. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them. On Friday, Charlie and I attended a [...]

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Communications in a Crisis

A Eurostar at St Pancras from lewishamdreamer

Photo: lewishamdreamer (from Flickr) The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening. The focus today is on the cause of the incident and [...]

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