Mash the State
Is Ann Treneman dumb?
Here we tackle thorny contemporary issues head-on.
8 December 2009 3:07 pm http://bit.ly/7leIqr
Great council websites aren’t enough. We need 1% for open data.
BBC News has run a government open data story today featuring Mash the State, Openly Local, Pic and Mix and Socitm. There’s probably not much there that will be news to avid open data followers familiar with these projects but by all means go and have a read. While there has been much talk [...]
13 October 2009 8:03 am http://bit.ly/1541kr
Ernest Marples: An elegy
Ernest Marples is dead and I am pissed off.
I refer, of course, not to the erstwhile postmaster general and transport minister who retired to the grave in 1978 but to the eponymous website which has been crushed beneath the Royal Mail’s clunking fist.
Ernest, you did one thing and you did it brilliantly. You gave programmers [...]
5 October 2009 1:50 pm http://bit.ly/nGJlj
Guerrilla noticeboarding the council with Barcode Posters
One of the biggest impediments to councils implementing RSS feeds and other forms of open data is a lack of imagination about what they and the rest of the world can do with that data. The classic use case for RSS — reading it in a feed reader such as Google Reader– doesn’t appeal very [...]
28 September 2009 11:35 am http://bit.ly/cdjVL
Hillingdon Council creates an RSS feed for every page
Ever wanted to track the changes to a webpage but found there was no easy way of doing it? The Hillingdon Council website makes this easy by generating an RSS feed for every page.
At the bottom of each page there’s a “Subscribe to this page” link and feed icon. The site also makes these feeds [...]
28 April 2009 9:04 am http://bit.ly/2YPfPQ
Top RSS tips for councils (and everyone else)
1. Validate your feeds
It only takes a moment to validate a feed. Invalid feeds can cause all kinds of unexpected weirdness in feed readers and other applications. Find any errors and fix them.
2. Use autodiscovery
People that use feeds a lot love autodiscovery. It provides a consistent way of finding and subscribing to feeds from any [...]
21 April 2009 4:25 pm http://bit.ly/8bS5I
Comments not allowed at your council website? Here’s how to answer back
A few people have raised the objection that what Mash the State is currently doing with council RSS feeds is really just helping councils to deliver their PR (or as those critics often like put it, “propaganda”).
In one sense, they’re right. A council’s press releases or “news” are just their own side of the story. [...]
20 April 2009 12:34 pm http://bit.ly/1pkmfX
Why I’m throwing down the gauntlet to our councils over RSS feeds
You’re free to republish this article under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK licence with credit and a link to Adrian Short / Mash the State
Today I connected 66 councils to their citizens by making it easy to subscribe to their news by email. It took me around ten minutes. I’d say this was a [...]
13 April 2009 6:13 pm http://bit.ly/97HG4
Not on Twitter? Follow our updates with RSS or by email
This blog is reserved for more lengthy updates about the Mash the State campaign. I’m using Twitter to post brief updates and snippets that don’t need a fuller explanation.
Twitter isn’t to everyone’s taste so for those that want to keep up to date with what’s going on but don’t want to join Twitter, here are [...]
12 April 2009 3:13 pm http://bit.ly/o6tyv
Mash the State is live!
Good evening everyone,
It’s nearly bedtime so this is just a brief hello and welcome to all the early-adopting state mashers out there.
If you’re wondering what this is all about, I hope most of your questions are answered in the FAQ. If not, please ask them here and I’ll do my best to answer them.
For now, [...]
8 April 2009 3:58 pm http://bit.ly/W9VNB
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