Ireland | Politics
Submitted by johnh on May 22, 2009 - 23:43.
...elapsed since we told people about KildareStreet, and so I'm going to tell you some stuff about how it's been going. Partly because a few people have asked and partly because we're quite keen to get some of the smug out of our systems :)
Traffic
9,000 people have pitched up and looked through the first genuinely-searchable version of the Oireachtas debates. They arrived in slightly more than 12,000 visits and have generated 55,000 page views.
There was an initial peak as a large number (too large to mention everybody here, but you know who you are) of Irish bloggers and Twitter users passed our new site around in the first 48 hours. Then it tailed off quite a lot. Then a fortnight ago Google results started turning up in large numbers for lots of relevant topics and Googlebot is currently retrieving about 3,700 KildareStreet pages every day and taking an average of 0.2 seconds each to do so. Those pages are not counted in the total I just mentioned. Since Google showed up it has added an extra 400% to the Google-less total of the week before.
We currently have a Pagerank of zero. I'm expecting that when it climbs off the floor next month we'll get still more traffic -- though we're already in the top ten for most queries I idly try at the moment.
Oh, and of the top ten search queries, eight are variations on 'KildareStreet.com'. The other two relate to Garda recruitment.
So in the past ten days traffic is now averaging higher than during our initial three-day boost and this week we've been doing an average of 3,000 pages every 24 hours.
And yes, I know it's a truly dismal metric in terms of objectivity, but about a week ago we overtook oireachtas.ie in Alexa's site rankings for Ireland.
Who's looking?
94% of the site's traffic originates in (the Republic of) Ireland.
Eircom's the largest ISP source of traffic, which doesn't surprise us since it's the largest ISP in the country. I'm a little surprised, however, that the number 2 spot was taken on day two by the Houses of the Oireachtas itself, and it's remained there ever since.
Joiners
397 people have signed up for email alerts for either search keywords or named individuals. We're currently sending about 130 email alerts every day. By way of comparison the numbers for TheyWorkForYou (which, to be fair, covers a country with fifteen times more people in it and has been running for about seven years now) are about 70,000 and about 20,000 respectively. The ratio is similar, though...
I'll tell you that several identifiable members of the Dáil and Seanad are among the signers-up. I won't tell you who they are or what they're tracking.
Effects so far
The piece which appeared on May 10th in the Sunday Business Post triggered a flurry of additional press items and got me talking about it on several radio stations. For future web site launchers, I cannot begin to tell you how much more significant the result was when we got two column inches in Metro than it was for anything else. You can see some clippings over here.
In our first week there was no new Oireachtas business.
In the second week they came back to work and the official site was generally being (fully) updated by about 2300 the day after each sitting day, but often containing major errors.
In the third week I got annoyed about this and called them out about the errors on KildareStreet's sideblog.
Since the day after that rant the official site has been finished for the day, on average, without errors and six hours more quickly. If we'd had no effect but that, I'd consider this worthwhile.
Finally
I did not know what would happen after we pushed this thing out of the door. We just knew it needed doing, and that if anybody else was ever going to do it, they would have by now.
In fact KildareStreet has become, in this small pond, a much bigger fish than I ever expected and very much more quickly than anybody anticipated.
I'm out of interesting info for now, and I've got five years of deliberately-ill-formatted TD and Senator expenses to finish parsing, so I'll end here.
Meanwhile: cheers, everybody.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on April 28, 2009 - 21:31.
A substantial part of the parser was reusable enough to make short work of the next major milestone for KildareStreet.com, although the standard of source material published by the Oireachtas was an order of magnitude worse than the Dáil's.
Je vous présente: Seanad Éireann -- every word uttered since January 20th, 2004.
That's another 1.5 million words or so.
And yes, this means you can sign up for email alerts and whatnot for Senators too, and search through the record for things uttered in the Seanad. All the same good stuff, but twice as much. Well, one and a half times.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on April 22, 2009 - 16:54.
Since 20th January 2004, the Dáil has been in session for 493 days (including today).
Up until this morning TDs made 249,489 speeches, and asked 160,503 questions which received written responses.
On average, TDs are producing 507 speeches and 326 written answers per sitting day.
Sadly you won't have had access to information like this before, since the Houses of the Oireachtas publishes the Dáil record primarily on an illegible website ridden with elementary display errors.
What we needed, it was decided (by myself and independently also by some other people, though I didn't discover their existence until last month), was a port to Ireland of the spiffing UK site TheyWorkForYou.com.
Then we could (gasp!) search the parliamentary record. Get RSS feeds for TDs. Set up email or RSS alerts for people or search terms. Maybe even be able to read the bloody thing without wanting to kill oneself after about twenty seconds of stupidly-and-permanently-underlined horror.
MySociety helpfully publishes the source code which powers TheyWorkForYou, and I installed it back in October. Some readers may recall me showing that site, containing nothing but a list of TDs in the right place, back at Barcamp Cork 2.
The trick, however, is to get all the actual debates and questions into the site's database. You need to build a parser program to convert all that data from one format into another -- in Ireland's case, from the raw XML published by the Houses of the Oireachtas which is primarily intended as a print publishing format for the official record, but which also powers debates.oireachtas.ie.
The parser project languished for a good while until MySociety got another contact (this time from Gavin Sheridan) and forwarded him to me. Gavin, basically, annoyed me into making more progress.
I started in earnest again about six weeks ago and have worked on almost nothing since then.
The end result
As of this afternoon, then, we're pleased to announce that Ireland's local version of TheyWorkForYou is called KildareStreet.com, and that it's now available in public beta.
It still contains bugs, so be careful about jumping to early conclusions :)
At KildareStreet.com you can:
- Read a dramatically-more-legible version of the Dáil Record going back to January 2004,
- Search that record using a fabulous search engine which I didn't write - you can restrict searches to speeches or written questions, or by speaker, or by date or date range,
- Sign up for email alerts for when a search query you're interested changes, or whenever a TD of your choosing says something or asks a question which generated a written reply, and
- Subscribe to RSS feeds for individual TDs or for search queries.
The site will be updated the day after each sitting day shortly after the Oireachtas publishes that day's first report version in XML. RSS feeds and emails are generated shortly after that.
Coming soon
In the next few weeks you will also be able to inspect the past five and a half years of TD expenses, and the register of members' interests.
There's a programming API in the code base which we have not yet properly localised, and is therefore not yet available. I shall sort that out as quickly as possible.
Once we've done all of that, I'll get started on the Seanad.
Thanks due
None of this would be possible without the code for TheyWorkForYou having been released under a permissive license. This is the second non-UK installation of this code base (after Australia) and there's also a similar project in New Zealand. So thanks to MySociety, and to Matthew Somerville in particular for answering a large number of stupid questions while I was putting this together.
The Houses Commission employs people who could, when they got wind of it, have made this project more difficult or even impossible. They did not do so, and I and you owe them our thanks for that. Leo Bollins and Tom Malone have helpfully answered questions about their publishing formats and not been freaked out when I sent them bug reports about their source material.
Gavin Sheridan poked and chivvied this project into existing now instead of later, is sourcing ancillary data like member interests and expenses, and will be helping to keep the site ticking over as a moderator. For the first of these above all, this site etc without whom blah blah blah. Cheers, Gav :)
Justin Mason contributed actual code to start parsing written answers and has offered to assist in making the data import process follow at least some sensible test-driven methods which my shonky parser does not even begin to follow yet. He is the only actual code contributor to KildareStreet other than myself and code is, frankly, everything. The parser as it now is isn't using his stuff (yet) but we owe him a debt of gratitude also.
Simon McGarr is quietly providing assistance in the background, the fruits of which will become apparent in due course. Thanks to you.
Finally, and more than all the above, I live with a very tolerant and patient wife. Sabrina Dent, not entirely unknown in these parts, has been working for money and covering everything in our house in that manner while I've been doing all this for no cash. She thinks it's a worthwhile project and if she didn't, KildareStreet absolutely would not exist. Hire her!
Anyway. KildareStreet. It's now in testing. Have at it. Send me bug reports. Enjoy.
And above all? I think it's time we raised our game generally. Blogs are fine, sure, but actual apps that help people are required. This is my first contribution. How about you?
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General
Submitted by johnh on December 1, 2008 - 16:52.
Javascript's never been high on my list of stuff to give a monkey's about. (Try parsing that, Babelfish!)
This is something of a shame since the largest portion of the list of things in the world which make me want to reach through my monitor across the internet towards web site "designers" and punch them repeatedly in the face could be forcibly corrected with Greasemonkey. If, that is, I could get over my prejudice regarding how all these bloody things which need correcting were caused by some fucknugget misusing Javascript in the first place.
Plus, such Greasemonkey scripts can be compiled into Firefox extensions, allowing me to proselytise the One True Right Answer to $something in that way, rather than pointlessly suggesting they install Greasemonkey and then a script for it, which they won't do because they're normal.
Anyhoo.
I want a Firefox extension which does this:
1. Scans every <a> element on the page, and if its href attribute does not contain a URI and only a URI, but instead says "#" or "javascript:openWindow()" or "javascript:void()" or some other obnoxious wankstainery,
2. Searches all the other attributes in the <a> element for a valid URI, then puts that in the href attribute and removes all the other attributes.
3. (Bonus) If it can in some way discover who was responsible for the thing which we just had to fix, punish them in some way, ideally in a fashion involving physical injury.
Because every day, thirty or forty times, I open a new link in a tab by middle-clicking on something only to later get to said tab and find your stupid fucking Javascript link in the address bar instead of a web page, you twats.
Pause. Breathe.
Oh, yeah. While we're at it... let's strip all new-window triggers from all pages, always, as well.
Do you add 'rel="_new"' to your links? Then fuck you. I'll open new windows when and if I want to, not because you think your shitty little blog should remain in its own place indefinitely because it's so much more important than the thing you linked to which is far more interesting than you are. You back-button-breaking, neophyte-confusing, resource-grabbing, clueless arsehole.
I'm pretty sure that these are widely-held (if often less profanitorily-expressed) opinions shared by all right-thinking people, and that at least one of them can whip this up as a userscript or extension. Let's get it done, if only for the sake of those of us who have to support the PCs of our less-nerdy relatives.
I can only hope that the Lazyweb somehow magics this into existence 'cos it'll take me several weeks I don't have to figure it out for myself.
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Ireland
Submitted by johnh on November 21, 2008 - 04:33.
The Golden Spiders were dished out over four hours ago, not that you'd know this from reading their website, which doesn't have the winners on it.
If anything was about to wake me from my long blog-coma, the bile that rises every time this list comes out was sure to be it, of course. In previous years -- to pluck one example out of thin air -- they dished out a Best Government Site award to Cork City Council, whose website not only failed to render at all in Firefox but then continued not to do so for another two years after the award.
Here's to the 2008 winners, then:
Congratulations first of all to Toyota, for winning Best Retail and Home Shopping Website with a site with no facility at all to actually purchase even so much as an air freshener.
Secondly, an honourable mention to TV3. Not only does it have an achingly-unresponsive Flash widget front and centre, but it contains a five-button navigation widget to choose between the highlighted items thereon. You can click on those five little squares until the cows come home, safe in the knowledge that it won't actually do anything at all.
Extra points to TV3 for having a horizontal scrollbar to help people with a 1024px-wide monitor and a fully-maximised browser reach the extra hundred pixels or so of fuck-all over to the right hand side of the site. And adding the facility to register without giving any reason whatsoever as to why on earth anybody would want to. Surely it's not simply so I can be spammed, right? Right?
On, finally, to Ordnance Survey Ireland, proud winners of the Best E-Government Website award for 2008.
The link's here. Or at least it would be if the domain without 'www' in front didn't result in a DNS failure. Epic Win!
Try this one instead.
"Looking for an address?" it says cheerfully on the front page. "Try our new interactive map!".
Alright then:
Oh, it's telling me I need to use Firefox instead of Mozilla 1.0. Which would be fair enough, if I wasn't using Firefox 3.
Onward, though. Let's try "looking for an address" then, shall we? First of all, spend as long as you like looking for somewhere to enter that address on the resulting page. It took me about five minutes.
For those playing along at home: click on the eye-bleedingly-small 'search' link hiding in grey-on-black ALL-CAPS type in a black box on the right hand side of the screen. When another dark-grey-on-black box appears, make sure to click and drag it by the title bar some distance over to the left so you can actually read what's coming next, since in its default position it just helpfully spits stuff out invisibly underneath the menu instead.
Next, start typing out a street address into its input box. Between that box and the utterly unnecessary internal-use-only debug code dump, if you pay attention and don't type too much of your address in, you may see the address you're looking for appear. At this point, whatever you do, DON'T click on the box marked 'Search' right next to where you've been typing. Because it doesn't do anything at all. Instead, click on the address in the list below. Or double click. Just keep trying one or both of those until something eventually happens.
Et Voilà! Finally it shows you the address you've been looking for!
Well, no.
Actually what you get is a map of the address you're looking for, with your search result helpfully not signposted in any manner whatsoever. The thing you were looking for is roughly in the middle of the map though. Surrounded by about twenty square miles of its surrounding area.
It's fucking great.
Go Golden Spiders! That's the best stuff from 2008. Thank fuck it's 2009 in five and a half weeks' time.
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Ireland
Submitted by johnh on February 21, 2008 - 13:26.
Item: Adult return ticket from Cork Kent to Dublin Heuston. €60.
Item: Adult return ticket from Cork Kent to Kilkenny MacDonagh, via Dublin Heuston. €49.
Try it for yourself.
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General
Submitted by johnh on January 19, 2008 - 22:52.
I'm not picking on Damien in particular (well, other than purely for sport), but:
You know who else comes to your site with a referer field containing "google.com"? Yup, Google Reader users.
Everyone using this plugin is basically slapping people who've already subscribed with a rather insulting message implying we're freeloading.
Cut that out, would ye?
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Ireland
Submitted by johnh on January 19, 2008 - 17:58.
RTÉ Radio 1 will go dark on 567kHz in eight weeks.
Yup, the so-called national flagship station will at that point become unavailable to:
a) Anyone in the sticks who can't pick it up on FM
b) Anyone listening on a receiver which doesn't have FM (they didn't need it, they listened to Radio 1).
c) Anyone at sea, who probably isn't using it to pick up the Shipping Forecast at the moment. (Though, to be fair, anyone thick enough to listen to Met Eireann instead of the UK Met Office shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 LW more or less deserves to drown.)
d) Touchy subject, this one: Anyone in Northern Ireland outside the FM coverage area. Officially, that's all of them. In practice, it's Goodnight Coleraine because it's almost impossible to buy a long wave receiver for less than a hundred pounds anymore.
e) Liverpool, Manchester, Stranraer and the M6/M74 corridor through Cumbria and up to Glasgow. No Irish people there, though, so not to worry, eh?
And finally, since it's Saturday and this is my gaff:
f) Anyone listening on a weekend who would rather not, on balance, listen to a bunch of people who know fuck-all about football talking about football, nor any extended coverage of the bloody GAA.
I live in Cork, so my radio options are extremely limited anyway, but right now there's exactly one station available on the band which is neither playing inept sport coverage nor trying to spoonfeed aural prions directly into my brain (And now on County Sound, and on Red FM, and on 96FM, it's the daily Simply-cocking-Red/ Damien-"RhymingSlang"-Blunt/Lighthouse-Family 20-hour marathon!).
It's Radio 1 on medium wave, with its "Second Helpings" slot all afternoon. If they shut down the service, I will no longer be able to set a clock radio alarm for lunchtime on a weekend for fear of having reheated pretend-live reports shouted in my ear from Stamford Bridge over the IRN satellite by some wanker who ended up on the sports desk at the Eckythump Telegraph because he was too thick to pass his court reporting exam.
Never fear, though - this alternative programming strand "is also available on RTÉ's trial digital service, RTÉ Choice". Whoop-fucking-ee.
Allow me to demonstrate:
On the left, a crude map of the Pale (shaded red) about 550 years ago. On the right, RTÉ's entire universe of editorial interest, and the total extent of RTÉ's digital radio transmissions. That's the footprint of the Three Rock and Clermont Carn transmitters, shaded dark green.
If you're not in that space, you can't receive RTÉ Choice. It's not on Sky, it's not on FM, it's not on AM. It's not even on the intertubes. Chances of DAB being extended to the rest of the country during a period where the state-funded broadcaster and the regulator haven't even decided what format to broadcast in when it comes off trial? Zero.
So enjoy what's left of Raidio Éireann while it lasts. You have two months.
Meanwhile, let's see if any of us can figure out why RTÉ is so institutionally wedded to a six-hundred-year old boundary, shall we?
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Ireland
Submitted by johnh on September 8, 2007 - 17:00.
...but if you want to poke about inside the newly-spectacular Google Maps, I've once again been doing my job as "that foreign guy with the map stuff".
In ascending order of interest:
- 377 Blarney Street, Cork
- 300 Blarney Street, Cork which, excitingly, is a different map point
- 64 Blarney Street, which is positioned very incorrectly. Possibly because this street's numbering goes uphill from 1 westward and then comes back downhill from about 200 eastward.
- "Pizza" near here, small result set and a little bit wonky
- "Cork Overview", which looks a bit like a bunch of community layers from Google Earth imported into Gmaps
- Pizza again, but on a much wider view. Including this so you can see the KMZ-labelled links, which give a clue of how this work-in-progress is being constructed. "GE45" looks like an aggregated view for a map grid.
This would be big news, so I'm going to hold off on the "about bloody time" comments for today. Well done, Google - now let's follow through and release it, eh?
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Ireland
Submitted by johnh on June 24, 2007 - 09:55.
Ring the bells. Hang out the bunting.
Yahoo Maps has already given all and sundry full permission to use its satellite imagery as something we can trace into Openstreetmap.
I've just noticed this morning that the satellite imagery for Ireland has jumped up in resolution to the extent that we can now trace streets here. Yay.
At this point in the narrative I usually don't bother to mention that I tried a street-level lookup just in case, and it didn't work.
Not today!
How about "387 Blarney Street, Cork, County Cork, Ireland"?
It gets better. That pin was really put in the right house. Really: look up the road at number 64 instead to see what I mean.
Oh, my. Could it possibly get any better than this? Well, yes. If we were wishing beyond our wildest hopes and dreams, they'd have added all this new sexiness to the Yahoo Maps Geocoding API. But that would just be a silly thing to ask for. Wouldn't it?
:-) :-) :-) :-)
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