Blog

  • A new intranet for DCLG (with more big savings)

    Since January we’ve been excitedly working on a new intranet for the Department of Communities and Local Government: a wholesale replacement for the previous collection of out-of-date and restrictive systems that DCLG had been using. We’re very happy to announce that the site went live to all staff members last week, and has been met…

  • Department of Health saves 96% on its web hosting with GDS and dxw

    We’re very excited to be able to announce that the Department of Health’s WordPress sites are now being hosted by dxw. This was a complex migration and has been in the works for a while, so we’re delighted (and relieved!) that it’s all come off well. DH came to us in the summer of 2012…

  • dxw is sponsoring CommsCamp

    We’re really pleased to be supporting the inaugural CommsCamp! We’ve posted more on their blog, at commscamp.com.

  • Rolling out bcrypt password hashing

    We’ve just started rolling out a change across all of the sites we host, to improve the security of user passwords. WordPress is very widely used. Because of this, WordPress’s development team often make decisions that keep WordPress compatible with a wide range of hosting environments. Sometimes, this comes at the cost of potential security…

  • Testing the Robot

    Yesterday, we did some quick tests on a robot that’s part of a design for an upcoming site. (More on that later). I tweeted about about it and got 168 responses, which was surprisingly high. Since it got so much input, I thought I’d write up the results, which, happily, aligned pretty well with our…

  • Timecop Gotcha

    Timecop is an extremely useful gem which allows you to simulate the passing of time in RSpec tests. We’re using it to test parts of Citrulu – for example, making sure we don’t send you multiple emails about the same thing. One of our tests has this shape: it “should do some stuff!” do #…