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The personal blog of
Dafydd Vaughan

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A look at the new Birmingham City Council website

The new Birmingham City Council website

Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back! There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed [...]

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How clean is your beach?

This is a bit different to my usual posts – but I felt this had to be said. Tonight, I had the misfortune of watching what has to be the second worst piece of reporting I’ve ever seen from the BBC (unfortunately ,the first also came from the same programme last year).  Panorama has to be [...]

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Why Government needed a Twitter strategy

Last week, Neil Williams from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published his draft Government Twitter Strategy. I think its about time someone sat down and produced a document like this. Some people have responded to the document negatively (as expected), some positively, and some have completely missed the point. I wanted to [...]

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Things I meant to blog about

I’m not quite sure where the past few weeks have gone, but quite clearly they’ve passed me by quickly. These are a few things I’ve wanted to blog about but haven’t had the time to write a decent entry. Normal service will resume shortly. Karoo disconnects file sharers Hull’s only internet provider – Karoo – [...]

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WhatTheyClaimed.com – a lesson in crowdsourcing

Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses. The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, [...]

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Who owns your portfolio?

An online portfolio is a must if you are a designer or developer

For web developers and designers the question of who owns your portfolio is an important one. It is a question that is not as clear cut as you might think. It seems that depending on your circumstances, you may not have any legal right to display the work that you produce. The general opinion is split into [...]

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A brief update

What’s been going on recently? – well quite a bit really. I’m now settled into my new job at Consumer Focus Labs. We’ve spent a few weeks getting our systems set up (not as easy a task as we’d have liked), our development environment in place and courting ideas from anyone and everyone. We’re now [...]

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Time for Change

Consumer Focus Labs

I’ve been a part of the team at VSI for the best part of nine years, originally as a summer job, but more recently as a full time developer. During this time I’ve seen significant changes in the way the internet works, from new technologies and new standards in design, to new ways of communicating [...]

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Talking about Website Accessibility

Number 10 website with text scaled up

Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility.  I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is.  This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the [...]

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CllrTweeps – The Directory of UK Councillors on Twitter

CllrTweeps version 1

A quick update this week! Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps.  The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter.  After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service. The first version of [...]

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