ulcc da blog

It was interesting to learn today from Rhodri Marsden’s Cyberclinic Blog that the Number 10 website now favours Wordpress over a previous Microsoft ASP system.

I’ve been an admirer of Wordpress for a while now. I think we first looked at it circa 2004, for an internal news management system, when we needed an alternative to falling foul of Movable Type’s new licensing arrangements. (I think MT’s now reverted to free licensing, but their paid-for interim probably did Wordpress a huge favour.)

Since then, I’ve used it successfully for DA Blog and several personal projects - not just for blogging, but also as a lightweight CMS. We’ve also seen the rise of Wordpress.com, Edublogs, and, closer to home, JISC Involve. It’s favoured by many web illuminati, such as Brian Kelly and Jill Walker. Wordpress is definitely on a roll.

As for Number 10, it certainly looks fresher than of old. Earlier news entries have all been imported - not always flawlessly. The earliest entry I can find is from 17th Feb 2000 (about 3 years before the first widely available version of Wordpress) - and it’s not “Hello World”. I imagine there is somewhere behind it all a bigger news machine than the usual Wordpress Admin interface - but, of course things like that are easy enough to integrate.

With JISC-PoWR in mind, and discussions about web archiving and continuity, it’s interesting to note that, as a result of the switchover, some versions of the Number 10 website in the Internet Archive are now well and truly broken, stylewise at least. Versions collected in The National Archives’ UK Web Archive seem to have fared better. Some of these seem to be based on Internet Archive material, others are part of the European Archive collection: not having looked for a while, I have to say it’s not quite clear where TNA’s UK Government Web Archive ends and the European Archive content begins. Also, a tad confusingly the “Prime Minister’s Office” website seems to be archived as both pm.gov.uk and number10.gov.uk. (The former now resolves to the latter, which may be a small step for Web Continuity.)

It will be interesting to see if the Wordpress switch improves the quality of the website in its ongoing archived form, and general preservability (at least, once they sort out a raft of validation errors). Although it’s not without pitfalls for the unwary, I recently found it fairly easy to create an offline snapshot of a Wordpress site (complete with valid HTML and CSS too).

I wonder whether The White House or The Kremlin will be next to embrace the Wordpress way?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.