James Cattell helps you to keep up to date with the .gov.uk blogs
One of our favourite projects at dxw is working with the GDS folks on the .gov.uk blog platform, which supports the blogging efforts of many different departments and individuals across government.
There are all sorts of reasons why blogging is a good idea for people working in government:
- it provides a platform for instantly publishing content to a potentially huge audience
- it allows civil servants to “work out loud” – writing about their progress in an honest and collaborative way
- it presents the work that government does in more human terms, giving a glimpse behind the scenes
Having a single platform for all the blogs across government makes life much easier for those people reading the content, as it is provided in a consistent format – and of course WordPress is the perfect technology for it to be based on!
However, while the proliferation of blogs on .gov.uk is a great thing to see, it does bring challenges with it, such as keeping up with all this new content.
We’re working on the problem at the moment, but in the meantime, good old James ‘Fingers’ Cattell – of GDS fame and GovCamp helper-outerer extraordinaire – has put together some neat hacks to overcome this potential overload of information.
Firstly he has put together an OPML file of the blog feeds so you can quickly import them into your favourite reader. Neat!
Secondly, he has created some IFTTT recipes to automatically pump out links to new content on Twitter, with a dedicated Twitter feed you can follow to keep up with all the new posts. All thanks, of course, to the magic of RSS, and James’ enthusiasm and knowledge.
How do you keep up with the .gov.uk blog content? Let us know if there is anything you’d like to see to make this easier!