This weblog is hosted at wordpress.com – which means we don’t have that much control over the look and feel of the pages. On the plus side, it’s free.
The theme we have been using has a notable omission: there was no visible byline on each post. In this theme there is.
We also chose a theme [...]
Believe it or not, we have had people asking.
The Hansard Prototype project is, for the most part, open source. The source data – the XML files – are available under Parliamentary Copyright; the application code is available under an open licence. So, with some work on your part, you really can download the data and [...]
Our traffic’s gone up, a bit. Nothing serious, but certainly noticeable. One source of traffic is someone – or something – using HTTrack, presumably to download content from the site for use offline.
Which is, of course, fine. But, if you are spidering or crawling our site, try to be polite. We get Google and Yahoo’s [...]
We’ve be talking about tagging and taxonomies on the Hansard Prototype Google Group. We won’t go over the discussion about folksonomies here – but we’re looking again at how we’ve managed tagging up until now.
We ran delicious.com links embedded in the page until recently – we took the function out in order to slim down [...]
We’ve just deployed the most recent build of the application code. We’ve not reparsed the source files, nor added any new content – it was mainly a tidying up effort.
Some pages are simpler, with a few things taken out or moved about. A lot more work has been done at the back end of the [...]
We don’t have a SOAP endpoint. There, I said it. We are, however, working on how we can represent information in formats other than HTML – things like JSON, OPML and KML.
We already have quite a few resources available now, although they’re not very widely known – and we’re going to be making a lot [...]
We’ve had a few queries regarding stats on the Hansard Prototype site itself. We use Google Analytics to track site usage – and it gives us a pretty good overview of what’s happening on the site.
Here are a few figures for the period of January – mid-August 2008:
Over 232,000 visits
Over 209,000 ‘Absolute Unique Visitors’
Nearly 653,000 [...]
As of today, the source code for the Hansard Prototype application has been downloaded 177 times. Frankly, I’m amazed. I’d have been amazed if there had been 17 downloads, to be honest.
Anyway, there it is – 177 and counting. It’s really no business of ours what you do with the source code: that’s part of [...]
We’re glad to have the opportunity to work on Hansard archives as a project – and we hope we’re able to continue developing the service to all users, outside and inside Parliament.
We’re able to develop the service thanks to the comments of users: people like you. Many people have been generous enough to get in [...]
We’re going to write up these release notes a bit more often in future. This is just a catch up on what we’ve been working on since the middle of last month:
as always, refactoring and speccing code
specs and code for methods to find bills and constituencies
handling sittings that seem to occur outside a volume
speeding up [...]
