Dumpling in a Hanky

Last week was a very trying week for me, website wise. One of those weeks when you just want to scream, because you can't believe people would do such frustrating things. I monitor a lot of web sources for news that's relevant to my employers business, and to do that, I rely heavily on RSS feeds. They allow me to see the output of sites quickly, and mean that I don't have to visit those sites repeatedly each day to be able to track their content. So, RSS feeds are VERY important to me. And in the context of Government sites, they're important for the general public too, helping to enable them to see what's happening in various departments, e.g. if consultations have been published that they might want to respond to, or if new regulations have been issued that may affect their business. Meanwhile...the Government has stated that it's consolidating websites into the www.gov.uk address, and 24 departments will be moving to that address over the next 18 months. ...

Today, I've spent a lot of time banging my head against the brick wall of bad or mad search design. First up was the Scottish Government, with its contribution to "thwarting any attempt at a search", by somehow managing to date various items as being released on October, November and December...of this year. So looking for recent items was impressively pointless. As was the fact that the search was also giving over 300k results. Looking forward to that Forced Marriage report in December. Then, I went into the Scottish Parliament website, to try doing a search in the Official Report.  Top tip: don't do this. Ever. Use Google to search the Parliament's website instead. Mainly because, if you can get the report to return hits, then you get to wade through the results, blindly. And blindly it is, because the search doesn't give you any idea of how many pages of results you've got, or any shortcut to get to specific points/leapfrog to a further point...

Looks like the UK Supreme Court's having a wee holiday from posting judgments (or as they call them, Decided Cases) on its website . The last case listed is [2010] UKSC 10, from the beginning of March. BAILLI however has the text of all judgments up to [2010] UKSC 32, this July. What's going on? Why are cases not being posted to the UKSC website? I can't find if there's an announcement about the cases being posted to BAILLI instead, as the news section only goes back to mid-June 2010, and the archive section only lists information from 2009. What's happened to the news that happened between 2009 and June 2010? But hey, at least they managed to publish their annual report and accounts yesterday. Wonder how much of it went into web design...? From the annual report: " Our website The Court is a modern institution on an international stage. Our website www.supremecourt.gov.uk continues to be a success with a wide audience and contains a considerable amount of i...

Iain Nisbet of the Govan Law Centre (and excellent, and entertaining Absolvitor blog) has referred to a (somewhat snarky) blog post I did back in October about the UK Supreme Court website in the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland (JLSS – not to be confused with a terrible manufactured boy band) While it’s great to see from Iain's review that things on the site have improved (and I’m blushing at the thought of having any sort of influence other than what craft class to run in the evenings), it did remind me to double check an issue with the cases that was still outstanding in November 2009, when I looked at the site again. Case [2009] UKSC 1 E, R (on the application of) v Governing Body of JFS & Anor (Rev 3) doesn’t actually exist on the Supreme Court site. You can find it via BAILLI , which shows the 3 cases the court decided in October. Searching for “[2009] UKSC 1” on the Decided Cases area doesn’t bring it up, nor does using the name. The only way to find it is a...

The lovely Scots Law News blog has pointed out a few teensy issues on the website of the new UK Supreme Court. I particularly like the thought of judges being tried in their very own court...wonder if there's specific crimes for judges? Other than the usual crossdressing (only a fashion crime) and frequenting "saunas" (sometimes a crime, depending on the activity indulged in...). Any suggestions for judge-specific crimes?

I went to look at the news on the JLSS site, and decided I'd agree to take part in the survey - I thought I might be able to give some feedback about the removal of the Library / research area, and why it should be redesigned. After all, it did say "We would greatly appreciate it if you could complete a short survey to help us improve the Journal website. Click here to have your say"... Instead, I got presented with the most random of surveys: Erm...hello? Exactly what has my home ownership status, and my hot beverage choice got to do with the website redesign, and the missing Library usefulness?!? Is someone there taking the pee? Were they scrambling to find a way to fill up SurveyMonkeys default setting of 10 questions, and threw in the tea/coffee option? Come on JLSS, you did an otherwise great redesign of the website (we're ignoring the Library 'thing' for just now), can you please not let it all down at the end with a silly, unfocussed survey?!

You turn your back for 5 minutes... Last week, the Law Society of Scotland launched a redesigned website for the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland, with minimal (if any) fanfare. Well, there may well have been a fanfare, but as I'm not a solicitor and so therefore not on their emailing list, I only found out when I went to check up on their news area last week. It doesn't even list it as something of note in their own News area...no press releases to The Firm Magazine , nor Scottish Legal News ...is this some sort of terrible secret, not to be publicised to the world at large? This is how it used to look (Feb 2008 image from Internet Archive): This is how it looks now: It is, however, a bit of a good news / bad news situation. So we'll start cheerfully with The Good News : It's pretty, it's shiny, and looks much more sleek and modern. The JLSS now has blogs, yay! There are links from the homepage to both the Editor's blog, and the Law Society's blog too...

If giving a fake name and date of birth to MySpace is a criminal act... Admittedly, I've not actually done anything criminal online, but I regularly make up a false date of birth / location / name when signing up to various websites. I refuse to give the real information when I beleive that all it'll be used for is to track what I'm doing on the site, and target marketing at me based on that information. Same reason that I don't have loyalty cards - if they want market research, they can put some work into it, rather than stalking my shopping habits! We're constantly being told to be more aware of how important and sensitive our personal information is, and not give it away without careful thought and consideration of the basis for the request for it. But by giving false information when we don't believe the request for out personal details are justified, we're breaching the terms and conditions of various sites. How can you win?

Thanks to Binary Law , I now know that the DTI has become something unpronounceable, the DBERR. Is it ‘deeber’? ‘debeer’? ‘deberr’ (which allows me to say: to deberr is human, to forgive, debine?) Fingers crossed that they decide to be sensible about the whole process, and don’t just decide to shift the whole site, with no redirects, thereby rendering entirely useless the work of anybody who’s spend any time creating weblinks to any of their information…yup, that’d be me then! Wonder if they’ll also fix the fact that their inbuilt websearch is the biggest excuse for a user enhancement I’ve ever seen, and has yet to ever actually work for me. Google and site specific searching is the only way I’ve been able to drag anything out of its depths! And did I miss any prior notification of this? As of yesterday, their site was DTI, today it’s morphing (logo gone, I assume the new one’s coming), but no hint of todays change. Today, it’s their entire front page. Have I been selectively bl...