I changed the blog theme again. Our last theme, nice though it was, didn’t have bylines on the posts. And we really want bylines.

Apologies especially to Will Howells, who was not only the very first commenter we had, but actually liked the previous theme. Sorry Will.

To be able to “stress test” our server, we’re preparing to deploy an Open Source application called Siege which simulates multiple users making HTTP requests to the web application. It didn’t do quite what we wanted in the logging department, so we’ve hacked it about a bit and, in the spirit of Open Source, made it available on GitHub.

Now we can get down to writing some test scripts that use Siege to test specific things on the server to see how it (and by extension our application) will behave under load. To make these artificial tests more realistic, Siege helpfully includes the ingenious -i command line option which will make it choose from the list of urls we give it in a cheerfully haphazard fashion, turning it into the server testing equivalent of a roomful of monkeys with internet browsers that will only connect to our site.

(The full command we’re looking to use is: siege -c10 -r50 –file=urls-to-test.txt -E session.log -i in case anyone was really interested in the geeky details)

Now to solve the problem where my plastic laptop starts to melt before the server looks even vaguely stressed…

I changed the theme of our blog. Our spartan ‘design’ was hurting my eyes. I’m trying out the ‘Day Dream’ theme – let me know what you think.

Work continues on the Find Your MP project.

I’ve aggregated our issues from Google project hosting and our GitHub commits into one @fymp Twitter account.

We’re working on the Find Your MP service API, which – at the time of writing – includes REST responses for HTML, JSON, YAML and plain text. I’ve written a scratch Google Application Engine app that calls our YAML output. It works! Not bad for an hour’s hacking.

We’re intending to release as much demo code as we can.

Whenever the blog goes quiet, it’s a sign that we’re coding a lot.

The latest public release of the Hansard Prototype now refers to ‘people’ rather than Members: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people – for example: Mr. Tony Benn.

This represents a substantial improvement in how we recognise and display those recorded as speaking in Hansard. Your comments are most welcome.

If you’re on Twitter, please feel free to comment there if you prefer – you can find me at @robertbrook. Apparently Tony Benn is on Twitter as well – but he’s not as chatty.

We attach Dublin Core metadata to our pages: view source on the Hansard prototype – it’s there at the top.

Is this metadata useful? Are we doing it right? Could we do it better?

We currently style tables in a slightly smaller font size than the main text on the Hansard prototype site. We’d really like to know if this is working.

Have you spotted a table that was incorrectly formatted? Do you find them readable and accessible? We’d be grateful if you could take the time to make us aware of any odd-looking tables using the Google issue reporting form.

We’re no longer recognising geonames in the Hansard text, nor are we producing KML files from sitting days.

Although it was an interesting experiment, it wasn’t useful enough in real world usage to enough people. Removing these experimental features means reparsing the source files is quicker.

We’re still working out what to roll out in terms of geographic search features.

As part of the Find Your MP project, a member of our team created a Generic Phusion Passenger Server VMWare virtual machine instance at Elastic Server. Don’t worry if none of that made sense.

What this means is: we use Elastic Server’s – er – service to create servers for local and cloud deployment. We use them in testing, development and production. We’re happy with what Elastic Server provides for us. Very happy. We’re even happier about the price.

We aim to release as much of our work as we legally can, which means practically all of it. This now includes parts of our infrastructure, released so others can build on it.

Why didn’t we just use Elastic Server’s default Passenger build? We tried it, but it didn’t do all we wanted exactly the way we wanted it to. We were able to tweak and build our own version and make that available publicly. Wins all round!

The Find Your MP service is being built using ElasticServer’s tools for creating virtual machines. CohesiveFT, the people who run ElasticServer, will be appearing – along with others – at CloudCamp London this Thursday 13th November.

I’ll be there – please say hello if you know me!